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Hans Urlich Reck
Trópos
'Disegno' and the Signs of Artistic Creativity: 
Text.Serial.Journal
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Monografica
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2012-11-01
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47-73
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Hans Urlich Reck
2012/11/01
10.13135/2036-542X/7616
47
Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln
2036-542X
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'Disegno' and the Signs of Artistic Creativity: 
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                                                       trópos • anno V • numero 1 • 2012 — ISBN 978-88-548-5420-8
                                                                DOI 10.4399/97888548542084 — pag. 47–73 ( 2012)




             ‘Disegno’ and the Signs of Artistic Creativity
Some Cultural–Historical Reflections on the Education of Artists in Europe

                                                             H U R
                                                Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln



   : The modern conception of art has radicalised the dispositif that origi-
      nally initiated the contemporary understanding of the liberal arts, but has not
      substantially changed it. Unlike the pictorial and stylistic forms of painting, one
      finds that over the past  years there has been a high degree of continuity
      in the meta–theoretical conception of the ‘signs’ of art: the signs of art can
      only be adequately defined and evaluated as iconography, but not with regard
      to any internal requirements for a creative work. Thus the question remains
      as to how the signs of art and the qualification as art are constituted. In the
      light of th century experience, the following reflections on an art history of
      creativity shaped by institutions explore core relationships and links flagged by
      the keywords ambivalence, dogma, destroying, and unlearning.

   : Creativity, fine arts, intentionality, academy, semiotics.




. Differing Assessments of Creativity and the Creative: Profanisation
   and Everyday Sacralisation of the Artist as Transgressor of Limits

According to leading design theorists, founders of academies, educators,
and ‘programmatists’ — from Federico Zuccari to the Bauhaus and the Ulm
School of Design — the fundamental essence of art does not change; it
is hermetic, unfathomable, and unknowable as a matter of principle. The
signs and indications of art and the qualification as art are held to be ambiva-
lent. This has two sides — a public and an internal one. The internal side is
that even without meta–linguistic verbalisation or substantiation, any con-
noisseur is capable of recognising the signs of qualification as art, including
gradations, graduations, and foundations, which is what makes him or her
a connoisseur. The other, public side stands fast by its opinion, firmly and
ostensibly unswervingly, that no theory exists for this, no doctrine, nothing
overarching, and there is scant evidence for any generalisation heuristics or
at least none that could enable an inductive determination.

                                                                                                            
    Hans Ulrich Reck


    In line with this is the genealogy of the concept of the academy, which
has exerted such influence on the modern era, the outlines of which were
laid down by the first major institutions of this type: the Accademia del
Disegno established  in Florence by Giorgio Vasari, and the Compa-
gnia di San Luca artists’ guild in Rome that Federico Zuccari reorganised
into an art academy in , the Accademia di San Luca. In the beginning
formulas and concerns were surprisingly simple. The effective reduction
of the debate about art that has taken place since then, in which there has
been a partitioning–off of the precepts of connoisseurship from, by contrast,
a proliferating discourse about the aesthetics of art and the rhetoric of its
works against the outside, is only comprehensible if one considers the entire
context in all its facets. Vasari’s sole concern was to advance the appreciation
and recognition of artists in a public sphere that had changed while at the
same time preserving the artists’ obligation to a relatively limited circle of
powerful people and an elite that commissioned artworks. Put differently,
Vasari sought the emotive participation of the public in an altered concept
that was never properly brought to their conscious attention. This had an
enduring impact on the image of the artist as well as on the artist’s role, but
particularly on the ‘new’ claim, justified on the grounds of innovation or
acceleration, to a changed and expanded range of action within society.
    Function, design, characteristics, and casting of the artist’s role were
redefined and established for the ultimate purpose of upwardly re–evaluating
the artist, who then became effectively disengaged from artisanry. The
public role of the artist autonomised art, although half of the academicians’
training in materials and techniques still had to be done in workshops. This
autonomisation consciously tied the new ambiguity of the image of the
artist to rendering the signs unclear through which art is recognised. Here,
as mentioned above, the discourse of the connoisseur was predominant.
The ambivalence of the signs of art in the public sphere masqueraded an
unambiguity; with the aid of which, as part of the aesthetics of power, a
doctrinarian or at least a rather dogmatic definition of art was laid down at
the Academy. Just a few decades after Vasari’s initiative in Florence, Federico
Zuccari pursued the same course in Rome.
    Vasari and Zuccari were not only first–class artists active in various fields,
they were also excellent writers and theoretical conceptualists. With his
Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects from Giotto to
Michelangelo — the first edition of  was just a single volume — Vasari
invented art history as a canon of artworks and upon this future expec-
tations would be oriented, schooled by a virtually unlimited abundance
of mechanisms and attitudes, safeguarded by sophisticated ‘cover stories’
or ‘legends,’ a cornucopia of fictions and rhetorical stylisations that had to
support, and indeed did support, the posited genealogy of the origins of
                                     ‘Disegno’ and the Signs of Artistic Creativity   


art as located in inexplicable genius. By contrast Zuccari engaged with the
theoretical structuring of artists’ training, with the endeavour of academic
programming in the form of the first institutionalised course of studies in
the modern era, with the artistic wellsprings of the imagination, as well
as with the conditions for the formation of aesthetic artefacts. These ef-
forts truly constituted the beginning of internal differentiation in artists’
education and training.
    This went hand in hand not only with the building and elaboration of
artists’ education that would be canonical for centuries, experiencing the
gradual development of drawing from objects to the human anatomy, of
composition from the sketch of an idea to the finished bozzetto, as well as
the theoretical grounding of the functions of art. To the extent that the
artist was recognised by society as freelance, so too the discourse on quality
became strictly the preserve of professional authorities on art. This social
generalisation was linked to a rigid particularisation of who was respon-
sible for making evaluations and to a hierarchy. This hierarchy reduced
the observer of an artwork to aesthetically enjoying the object and to ex-
periencing the reconstruction of the artistic decisions manifested in the
work (conditions and issues related to the specific form of the work and its
execution as the aesthetic realisation of an idea), and relegated the observer
to a subordinate position vis à vis the inventions of the programme– and
decision–making powers — from the impresarios to the artists themselves.
(Heilkamp, Winner )
    A parallel development was that this institutional art sphere spawned
a real interest in questions of ‘creativity’ in a modern sense. It was at this
point that creativity entered the stage in a powerful way together with the
fine arts’ stylisation of its rhetoric and content. (Saxl ) Creativity then
became the exclusive province of the professional art sphere. It was not until
the deconstruction of the academic canon by artists such as Goya, Blake,
and Cézanne and the idiosyncratic reformulation of artistic self–assertion
in the th century that the ground we know today was prepared for the
drifting apart of art and creativity. As a result art that appeared only hermetic,
arbitrary, and singular (Wittkower, Wittkower ) — independent of how
it was evaluated — was obliged to make way for a view of creativity devoted
to enhancing the status of the everyday outside of art. In other words it was
of the opinion, and also propagated it, that it could dispense with the effort
of transforming and transgressing — that is, the conditions of heretofore
exclusive, so–called ‘creativity’. (Blumenberg ) Thus what an artist is,
can now only be identified via mediation; art cannot be taught or learned.
This argument proved successful; however, ever since Cézanne all it actually
means is that contemporary art no longer follows any aesthetic institutions,
norms, or exclusive monolithic theory.
     Hans Ulrich Reck


    Just as the visual language of later, self–referentially enhanced painting
since Cézanne appeared solely as the internal enrichment of a systems–
theoretical operation, namely, a sealing–off of the subsystem of art from
other subsystems, so too the social usefulness of creativity was detached
from art and extended to embrace a secular, inner social postulate, and
ultimately also to intra–psychological, universally random promises of the
creative life in general. Thus it was rendered elementary and devalued at
the same time. By contrast, in the modern construction of the emancipated
‘liberal arts’ the universal view was undisputed that the creative act in art
was based on the transformation of reproducibility and, above all, on the
transcendence of the conditions of ‘ordinary’ life. Since the time of J.P.
Guilford, Gordon, and Taylor (Guilford ; Guilford ; Guilford et al.
; Gordon ; Taylor ; Taylor, Barron ; Taylor, Williams ),
the exactly contrary view is championed by the psychological approach
to creativity. This approach is typical for the th century and for the re–
valorisation of a normatively unified facticity of the ‘personal’ (and thus of a
fictional construct that again remains non–transparent; Heubach ). It
asserts as a normative fact that the conditions of the self are the order of
creativity in the immanence of the empirical.
    The paradigm of self–realisation that is grounded in this therefore orig-
inates primarily from corrections to the biometrics of abilities prescribed
by strategic considerations, which in the era of the U.S. Sputnik crisis were
attributed to the intangible inventory of the personality in parallel and
analogous to cognitive intelligence. (von Hentig ) In effect, this univer-
salisation abolished the sectorial and territorial boundary with art. It no
longer has any function with regard to paradigmatic and the exemplary
nature of creativity, but instead coexists as a societally insignificant variant of
the type of life perception, which — without any effort, work, or necessity
to transgress — seeks to endow purely vegetative existence, and particularly
one’s own existence, with added aesthetic value.
    Analysis of the various signs and indications for constructing the im-
manence model of creativity on the one hand, and of the transcendence
model of the creative arts on the other gives insight into the extended and
consequential instrumentalisation of the fine arts in the th century. In the
following I shall give an outline of this with respect to certain historical
caesuras and ideal–typical shifts in the dispositif of discussing art.


. The First Programmes: Vasari and Zuccari

Giorgio Vasari pioneered art historiography that bases on technical innova-
tions and the personality of the artist. Thus he is regarded as the father of
                                    ‘Disegno’ and the Signs of Artistic Creativity   


modern art historiography. Against conventions that became established
later, Vasari had no problems in combining art criticism and art history. He
argued critically but ran no risk of being accused of propagating normative
and unempirical aesthetics. Nor did his discussion of the quality of artworks
detract from his authority as a scholar. Vasari’s art history is based on the
depiction of legends about individual artists, that is, on deliberately eulogis-
ing rhetoric. It is a narrative that pre–dates the branch of knowledge and
praxis that was subsequently moulded and controlled by academies and
institutions of higher education. Vasari’s historiography follows the rules of
the classical rhetoric of panegyrics and ekphrasis. It is about establishing a
canon based on judgements which are always and explicitly substantiated
subjectively.
    Vasari followed the potent model of the artist’s biography that constructs
legends (see also Kris, Kurz ; Wittkower, Wittkower ) and that
cannot be measured against historical values and insights. By contrast, later
scholarly art historiography introduced irreversible changes: from norm–
setting philosophical speculations to empirical research aimed at developing
historical scholarship. However, the emotive model of centring art and
its theories in the practises of artists survived and remains the standard.
As a corrective, since Vasari this has run contrary to the scholarly and
scientific notion of objectivity. Objectivity comes up against its limits when
confronted by artworks’ claims to possessing a quality that is paradigmatic
and timeless. This quality formed within the artworks, and from them it
emanates. In the lineage descended from Vasari’s narratives promoting the
creation of legends, each qualitative opinion or judgement of an artwork,
an epoch, or a style had to refer exclusively to the manifestation of the
exceptional artistic quality that the outstanding works placed before the
observer which served at once as orientation and as binding. For then as
now the concept of art continues to be based on quality judgements as
expressions of art’s power to move and affect. There is not one style concept
that remains untouched by this, not one formal analysis that is objective in
a rigorous sense.
    The historiographical background, the grounding of art history as poet-
ology of the artistic life, however, is just one dimension of Vasari’s oeuvre
and achievement; he is a figure of seminal importance for the entire dis-
positif of the modern visual arts with his exceptional talent for organisation
and necessary ‘will to power.’ As founder of an art academy and as im-
presario Vasari relied on a specific conception of artistic design and at the
same time saw in it an aesthetic justification of art’s ‘will to power.’ Art as
a blueprint and a method became concrete in the models of concetto and
disegno, whereby at that time ‘design, art of design, draw, draughtsmanship’
(English translations of disegno) always remained tied to mastery of the
    Hans Ulrich Reck


aesthetics of power. This was the most important concern of the first truly
modern art academy, the Accademia del Disegno founded by Vasari in
 in Florence. The school had, like the concept of the academy itself, a
long prehistory. At around the same time that Leonardo da Vinci initiated
and directed his legendary albeit hermetic or arcane academy in Milan (of
which we at least know that contrary to his earlier position, Leonardo in-
sisted on a complete separation of training in skills and art and thus also on
separate roles and functions), Lorenzo il Magnifico, who also encouraged
Marsilio Ficino’s foundation of the Platonic Academy, founded “the first
small and informal school for students of painting and sculpture, a school
independent of all guild rules and restrictions” in Florence in . (Pevsner
: )
    Naturally, Leonardo takes pride of place at the beginning of the history
of modern art education, even though it remains uncertain whether he
actually founded his academy. Unlike the institution of the pragmatic public
relations strategist and author of conceptual programmes Vasari, Leonardo
da Vinci’s academy disappeared in the vague and contradictory details of
later descriptions. Parallel to a romanticised reception of Leonardo and
his oeuvre, these accounts exhibit a strong tendency to project a bias to-
ward science and art theory onto his educational establishment. Clearly
Leonardo’s academy could not escape the Maestro’s aura, even though he
consistently and firmly rejected efforts calculated to achieve public effects
with art. For Leonardo the only acceptable public art was the orderly array
of infrastructure, technology, fortifications, and machines used for military
purposes. Accordingly, it remains an open question whether Leonardo’s
establishment should be regarded as an institution for education or a labo-
ratory for sophisticated research and experiment. Be that as it may, around
 the designation ‘academy’ for an art school was unusual.
    To understand what Vasari sought to achieve one must take into account
the decline of the guilds in late th century Florence. Like elsewhere in
medieval Europe painters and sculptors belonged to guilds. Sculptors had to
join the Arte dei Fabbricanti because they worked with stone. Painters were
members of the Arte dei Medici, Speziali e Merciai because they worked
with pigments. As early as  the painters formed an association with
its own council within the guilds. The Compagnia di S. Luca for painters,
sculptors, and other artists was probably founded in the early th century.
The statutory obligations were of a liturgical–religious and social nature.
    Towards the end of the th century it was obvious that this organisational
principle was in decline. Although the Compagnia di S. Luca guild was
formally protected because membership was compulsory for practitioners
of the professions it represented, it had ceased to be a source of fresh
artistic momentum. By Vasari’s time, in fact, it had lost all significance.
                                    ‘Disegno’ and the Signs of Artistic Creativity   


The donation of a ’tomb for future burials of artists’ in  gave Vasari
an opportunity to act. Assuming that this burial site would be open to all
artists, irrespective of which guild they belonged to, Vasari proposed a new
system of organisation that would both enable artists to break free of the
guilds and to attain higher social status. To this end he secured the support
of Cosimo de’ Medici. On January th ,  detailed statutes were laid before
the Grand Duke. After he had given his approval, the constitutive assembly
was held. The appointed heads of the association were Cosimo de’ Medici
and Michelangelo, who was at that time well advanced in years and living
in Rome, “a combination of prince and artist, eminently characteristic of
the state now reached in the development of the artist’s social position.”
(Pevsner : )
    The original goal was to establish a prestigious centre of artists who
could lay claim to a higher social standing than skilled artisans. Vasari’s
second goal, which Zuccari was to pursue later, namely, the reform of artists’
education, after a few decades became the main focus of the Academy,
which indelibly marked its success and its image over the course of history.
The original, elaborate programme of instruction quickly became reduced
to drawing from nature.
    With its public declaration of pride in the profession the Academy en-
deavoured to compensate the artists theoretically for the independence
they could never attain vis à vis the members of the Medici court. With
this academy the artists could achieve on a symbolic level equality with the
sciences and an equal status with poets and philosophers who had leading
roles (in Florence, e.g., the influential Poliziano und Ficino). The statutes did
refer to the functions of teaching and provided for a library and collections
of plans, models, and drawings. Lessons in geometry were also mentioned.
However, in reality the teaching programme was mainly confined to a
well–meaning instruction of beginners (dilettanti). In its early phase the
academy was an expression of a new public image of the artist as well as a
changed self–image on the part of the artists themselves. One could define
this as self–referential and autopoietic; as defining art by means of its own
praxis. Correspondingly, the emphasis was not on the learnability of art,
but on trust in the power of an art system that was self–supporting and
self–regulating, as well as capable of self–modification and self–assertion.
(Wittkower, Wittkower ) The external rules of technical instruction
and also the normative orientation of the aesthetics either faded into the
background or was absorbed into the system.
    The programmatic rationale can be summarised as follows: Vasari in
Florence and, a little later, Federico Zuccari in Rome, attempted with the
aid of an enhanced concept of the artist as genius to secure for artists the
singular, individual, quasi divine right to imagination and, at the same time,
      Hans Ulrich Reck


to commit them, as a mediating, productive force, to the organisational
premises of imperial, neo–aristocratic hegemony beyond theological pro-
paganda. It is in this power–political orientation that the real significance
of Vasari’s foundation of an academy lies. It was not only an art school
but also the materialisation and expression of the institutionalisation of a
systematic historiography of art, established and stabilised in the presence of
the founder of art history, in which disegno reigned supreme. The primacy
of the concept — the drawing, the brilliant design, the perfection of the
finished picture that was already discernible in the detailed sketch — has its
origins here, with all the momentous consequences, and up to the present
day still represents the most profound attestation of the ability to create art.
    On this magic quality of the line, accentuated as disegno (which was
taken up later most emphatically by John Flaxman, William Hogarth, and
of course by Jugendstil and Art Nouveau), Vasari concludes:
     Seeing that Design, the parent of our three arts, Architecture, Sculpture, and
     Painting, having its origin in the intellect, draws out from many single things
     a general judgement, it is like a form or idea of all the objects in nature, most
     marvellous in what it compasses, for not only in the bodies of men and of animals
     but also in plants, in buildings, in sculpture and in painting, design is cognizant of
     the proportion of the whole to the parts and of the parts to each other and to the
     whole. Seeing too that from this knowledge there arises a certain conception and
     judgement, so that there is formed in the mind that something which afterwards,
     when expressed by the hands, is called design, we may conclude that design is not
     other than a visible expression and declaration of our inner conception and of that
     which others have imagined and given form to in their idea. (Vasari : )

    One has to keep this theory of concetto and disegno in mind in order to
recognise that, in the contemporary context, the concept of maniera was
forward–looking. Vasari used the concept of maniera, which employed in
a derogatory sense was current in circles that increasingly regarded artists
as whimsical, eccentric, and above all as unreliable and obstinate. How-
ever, Vasari did not use the term either to challenge or signal innovation,
but rather to point to continuities and traditions. For Vasari it was not a
question of whether a work was — in the modern sense — a testimony
to the supreme individual caprice that is the hallmark of a masterpiece.
(see Hocke ; Hauser ) Rather, it was the fact that individualisation
ensues and, with it, the negative, regrettable consequence that art theory
is no longer supra–individual and binding. Vasari endeavoured to release
maniera from the aura, from the autonomy, and also from the hubris of
the artist. For him, maniera represented working practices in the sense of
late medieval workshop traditions that did not require any inordinate talent
but could be learned or reproduced by anyone through frequent repetition,
acute observation and adaptation, and by virtue of the specific teaching and
                                    ‘Disegno’ and the Signs of Artistic Creativity   


working environment of the workshop.
    Vasari’s concept of maniera, in contrast to all later usages of the term
(Kemp ) which have an understanding of the individual that is precisely
the opposite, does not yet distinguish between artisanship and art. Creativity
is still identical to following comprehensible rules to generate and trans-
form; their continuity was guaranteed both by the authority of the master
as well as the discipline that excluded anything deemed non–conforming
or deviating from the laws and norms imposed by the autonomous realm
of the medieval workshop. Such veneration of tradition, however, was
decidedly a thing of the past in the second important modern academy,
Federico Zuccari’s reorganised St. Luke’s Guild of  in Rome. In the Ro-
man visual arts school it was not craft traditions that were the central focus
but the supra–factual, spiritual, imaginative exclusivity of the artist–genius;
this represented a decisive caesura in the modern intellectual history of
creativity.
    Yet the same historical conditions framed Zuccari’s endeavours in Rome
and Vasari’s in Florence. Artists were obliged to belong to a guild; which
reduced their aspirations and pretensions to the level of artisans. Many
attempts were made to form associations that flouted the classification in
guilds; for example, the foundation of an association solely for artists in ,
the Virtuosi al Pantheon. Also, the first attempt at reforming the Accademia
del Disegno in the s failed. It was not until Federico Zuccari secured the
support of Cardinal Federigo Borromeo that he succeeded in establishing
a new space for a changed understanding of art: on November th , 
the Accademia di S. Luca opened marked by the celebration of mass in the
church of St. Martina. By contrast, the inaugural meeting afterwards took
place in a shack. Zuccari was elected president and given powers to appoint
his own coadiutori und consiglieri.
    As mentioned above, the main purpose of this academy was the same
as discussed in connection with Vasari, but with a different accentuation of
internal aspects of the artists’ training. Great importance was attached to
drawing from plaster models and from nature; special emphasis was placed
on the subjects of landscape and animals — an anticipation of developments
to come in the th century. In the programme of Zuccari’s academy the
institution of the modern art academy seems to have been planned and
realised at a stroke. There were appointed professors, course appraisal at
regular intervals, an aesthetic canon, a hierarchical order of subjects, meth-
ods, and genres as well as the non–regular awarding of prizes plus a vast
reservoir of sponsorship and patronage. Public funding was obtained and
a market came into being. Well–known architects, sculptors, and painters
taught there. Zuccari set up a lecture series on theory, albeit with consid-
erable effort, which explored art concepts on all levels, particularly disegno.
      Hans Ulrich Reck


Although the Academy did not play a major role in the later lives of any of
the painters who studied there, it did initiate the later form of art education
with its hierarchical structure that has been authoritative, canonical, and
standard for centuries: drawing models, objects, landscapes, still lifes, then
animals, nudes, people in action and in groups, variable and ever more com-
plex situations. At the top, the consummate achievement was the allegorical
picture, usually a history painting, a visualisation of a classical or Chris-
tian subject from the repertoire of Western themes arranged according to
significance and levels of difficulty.
   One can summarise the innovations in the education and training of
artists of the th century as follows:
     Leonardo has not founded nor conceived an academy of art, but his theory together
     with Michelangelo’s personality have done more than anything else to prepare the
     ground on which Vasari and Zuccari could erect the first art academies. Vasari
     by chiefly emphasizing the representational and Zuccari by placing foremost the
     educational purpose of an academy have clearly mapped out the two principal tasks
     which academies of art were to set themselves in the future. That this occurred
     under the auspices of Mannerism, the most schematic and the most ‘totalitarian’ of
     all modern styles, and moreover the one most devoted to taking over compositions,
     figures, details from the works of great classic masters, has determined the character
     and the destiny of academies of art down to the twentieth century. (Pevsner :
     )

    Even more crucial and enduring has been the influence of the Mannerist
cult of disegno, of the design, of the initial consummate idea, of the draw-
ing and the concept, on the future. The disegno or drawing — elaborated
prominently by Federico Zuccari, as aforementioned, with considerable
theoretical effort — sacralised the disegno interno as the medium of a ‘segno
di dio in noi,’ as a solemn divine vision, as the aesthetic incorporation of
god–like creativity in the artist. Disegno such as this is realised in the line,
in its form and outline, which executed confidently and masterfully up
to and including Picasso is considered as the expression of an artist’s skill,
command, and genius. At the same time these contours merely express an
internal, more seminal complement to expression; namely, the meaning of
a complete mental concept of an artwork that is yet to be realised. Disegno
marks the origin of artistic judgement and selects, evaluates, and indicates
who belongs among the masters of aesthetics, the art connoisseurs. (Hocke
)
    Additionally, disegno marks the final form brought forth by the artist,
     . The theory of disegno (disegno primo: interno, intelletivo; disegno secondo: esterno, pratica; where
disegno esterno is divided into disegno naturale, disegno artificiale, and disegno fantastico–artificiale)
as a creative process coherently connecting and controlling the aggegation of nature and art was
developed by Federico Zuccari, inter alia, in his work L’idea de’ pittori, scultori et architetti.
                                   ‘Disegno’ and the Signs of Artistic Creativity   


the end point of a sequence of steps to knowledge, the beginning of which
Vasari sees as a synthetically imagined disegno that is at work even before the
actual mental concept. Disegno retains the source of the general judgement,
enables the synthesis of the powers of imagination, guarantees the proce-
dure of ‘common judgement,’ and, with its ability to imagine the form of
things, also the endurance, aptness, and proportionality of this judgement
as a yardstick for the coming into being of the concrete, individual artwork
(the medium as well as the example of objectification). It is upon disegno
conceived in this way that knowledge of things and their interrelationships
builds, both epistemologically and cosmologically. Applied disegno becomes
the rhetorical art of concinnitas: skilfully put together or joined, where the
parts harmonise perfectly with the whole, and the whole with the parts.
(Baxandall ) Knowledge of things always takes the form of certain ideas
or conceits (concetti), which are captured by the drawing and given a form
that can be universally experienced. In the history of art, disegno plays the
role of an absolute, given measure that comprises all things and all relations.
It remains, however, an ideal construct or precept. Any single work of art
can only approach this ideal; it can never truly achieve it.


. Forget and Un–learn: Opening Up to the Paradoxical after the ‘Clas-
   sic’ Painters (Reynolds, David, Goya, Friedrich)

Later artistic praxis that embraced improvisational and aleatoric techniques,
(Reck , b) which continually arose over the course of the centuries
from the interplay of mannerisms and resistance to aesthetic, particularly
institutional doctrines, demonstrates that regardless of the precise desig-
nation of the issues involved, improvisation is about finessing one’s own
consciousness that seeks to instigate programmes and compositions as well
as the attendant practices of designing. For although during the genesis of
an artistic form — in order to gain an area of freedom won in opposition to
applying the learned norms and conventions — it is necessary to remember
what has just happened to continue playing through the possibilities, the
paradox is that this has then to be forgotten again immediately in order to
continue playing through ‘freely.’ This paradoxical circumstance is not a co-
incidence; it indicates a decisive change. With this the paradoxical becomes
programmatic, is deliberately included, shaped, and enhanced in discourses
within academia.
    The new conceptions have to do with individual variability of aesthetic
norms, which no longer conceive of objectives solely on the level of style,
but above all as methods and procedures. The result was that the art
academies, which had actually stagnated, became capable of regeneration
    Hans Ulrich Reck


on a higher plane. (Yates ) They always remain modern and yet at the
same time ‘classic.’ Since the late th century, un–learning, destroying,
and disintegration have been part of the academy’s programme: learning
through deviating, un–learning how to learn in order to open learning
from which rules have been banished. In this way a meta–level has entered
institutional practice: one needs to have learned an awful lot before one
can put un–learning into one’s work as an enhanced readiness to innovate.
First and foremost all learning has to be already concentrated in the power
to problematise, in empowering learning to continual virtuosity so that
it can retain its vitality. In this sense art has nothing to do with ‘higher
levels’ and even less with ability. And not at all with routine or virtuosity
in the technical command of means of expression. This kind of art only
involves the capacity to perceive something as a problem that is otherwise
not regarded as such; quite frequently because it is supposedly too trivial.
Running counter to the common suspicion of hermeticism, the proxim-
ity of the arts to the self–evident and ‘ordinary’ binds modern art to the
ability to un–learn and to radical aesthetic and form–creating innovation
by de–automatising, displacing, and de–objectifying or ‘alienating’ what is
habitual.
    Seen from this viewpoint, the later, allegedly so new radicality of Jo-
hannes Itten’s ‘preliminary course’ at the Bauhaus (Wick : –) is
neither radical nor new. In Itten’s view, all images that have come down to
us, including their traditions and roots in individuals’ life histories, must
be destroyed in order to void or break down identity and to overcome
fixations by forgetting; however, already in the th century the awareness
of the power of aesthetically enhanced liveliness to subvert norms played
a prominent role. It did not appear as a positive artistic norm, but had
to proceed indirectly via subversion and destruction. The concept of the
genius as a decontrolling resource of ‘nature’ seemed like a strategy for
opposing the academic taming of talent and its ossification through routine.
To avoid preconditioning, artistic dogma, and canonisation of designs, Itten
only recognised the sensual experience of materials as the teacher of form
to personalities that had been ‘cleansed’ of all previous feeling. This is remi-
niscent at once of the th century and of a similar, albeit overtly religious
programme of de–memorialisation of one’s previous life and older identity,
as outlined and perfected by Bernard of Clairvaux in the Meditations in the
th century. (Coleman )
    Bernard of Clairvaux founded a religious identity wholly dedicated to
serve religion using a kind of artistic method. Johannes Itten established
a religious practice, an array of instruments (which included standardised
hairstyle and clothing, in other words, a uniform) that was wholly dedi-
cated to nurturing future artistic talent. These two methods are at once
                                   ‘Disegno’ and the Signs of Artistic Creativity   


symmetrical and, with regard to the wider context, a synthesis: the indissol-
ubility of art and religion, which in its entirety elucidates art’s theological
and metaphysical heritage and, in addition, the problem of its continuation
(with reference to art as a genuinely independent epistemology; Picht ).
Other evidence supports these findings, for example, Goya’s reasoning
in  for his Caprichos insisted on the right of the artist to establish the
truth of his reality completely autonomously through fragmentation and
deconstruction of immediate reality, even when this appeared to the outside
as pure caprice and hubris; thus Goya insisted on the creative necessity of
destroying recognised forms and designs at any time.
    A noteworthy example of the artist’s increased intention to achieve self–
determination, of insistence on a creative process that opposed aesthetic
conventions and the objectified artwork, of that the artist was obviously
obliged to deviate from the customs and practices of the academy in the
design of artworks, is the case of Caspar David Friedrich. Against the same
cultural backdrop Caspar David Friedrich subordinated the appearance to
a coherent artwork in such a manner that he was able to try out rather
singular methods in the painting and clearly highlight these. To appreciate
this fully, it must be remembered that Friedrich’s vehemently anti–academy
stance developed in an environment in which once again a triumphant high
point of traditional, standardised academic painting was starting to emerge.
Friedrich studied at the Copenhagen Academy of Arts. This institution
paid close attention to what was going on at the Paris École des Beaux
Arts and immediately transmitted any news to other places, even as far as
Russia. Friedrich was fully aware of this imminent new ‘Golden Age’ which
was just beginning in Denmark. This circumstance is important because
it necessarily leads to a differentiated view of Friedrich’s anti–academy
sentiments. It must be concluded that he was not in revolt over a declining
and stagnant academicism, but above all he was angry about the intention
to launch a new Golden Age of painting, promoted particularly by the
French painters Jacques–Louis David and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres,
with the aid of a new doctrinarian academy and to institutionalise it as a
totalitarian art programme (Hofmann ). On the other hand Friedrich
also fought against the art of the Nazarene movement, which he considered
as art from art and therefore weak and feeble.
    The emotion that forbade Friedrich from becoming part of a succession
of religiously inspired, merely retrogressively oriented traditions was evi-
dently iconoclastic. Perfection of technique in the academic tradition was
for him, who was himself a past master of the art of painting, simply ‘wag-
gling a paintbrush.’ A comparison of his drawings and paintings evidences
that Friedrich was supremely capable of operating within the tradition of
academically schooled concetto. His paintings exhibit a deliberately exag-
       Hans Ulrich Reck


gerated and hardened variant of this, a conscious brutalisation of his own
conceptual capabilities on canvas. His chief concern was the impression of
‘honest artlessness,’ the establishment of a different, other code of credibility.
The previous virtuosity of dissemblance of naturalism, the entire repertoire
of dexterous artistic feats left him cold. For the code of a new credibility
he was willing to accept that, compared to the older, virtuosity–addicted
generation’s appetite for demonstration that showed no sign of abating,
his ice floes looked as though they had been painted on cardboard for the
theatre by a scenic painter.
   Admittedly, Friedrich did not stand alone or exclusively for Romanticism
with his primitivistic gestus. Surprisingly, Jacques–Louis David and Joshua
Reynolds, who was frequently vitriolically criticised by William Blake, both
spoke of an art of unlearning, désapprendre, for which there was topical
demand and which the various arts should develop. In a speech to the
academy on December th ,  Joshua Reynolds said:


     And, indeed, I cannot help suspecting, that in this instance the Ancients had an easier
     task than the Moderns. They had, probably, little or nothing to unlearn, as their
     manners were nearly approaching to this desirable simplicity; while the modern
     Artist, before he can see the truth of things, is obliged to remove a veil, with which
     the fashion of the times has thought proper to cover her. (Reynolds : )


    Clearly, this is not only a reference to a coherent, ‘true’ style, but repre-
sents a foray that anticipates a view of modernity regarded not as a truth
that is in contrast to something else, but only in relation to itself, as became
explicit with Chateaubriand. Jacques–Louis David, who was enormously
influential through his workshops, his art politics, and the training of gen-
erations of his successors, used the slogan of désapprendre to underline
forcefully that frivolous Rococo should be stamped out. However, not ev-
erything should be forgotten, only the false doctrines.
    Here the modern impetus of self–imposed iconoclasm is not yet absolute
and only applied to itself in an elaborated and totalised manner, as in
Arthur Rimbaud’s watchword “Je est un autre,” which signifies that ‘one’s
own’ is always an Other and does not exist ‘as such.’ In the case of David,
iconoclasm was absorbed into reactivation of the art of classical antiquity
as a model. One of his students, the later literary critic E.J. Delécluze
wrote in his memoirs that David systematically practised the technique
of forgetting what was old and untrue. Everything that had merely been
learned superficially, everything that was untrue, needed to be forgotten to
create a contemporary living space for the classical. This went so far as to
demand that everything the art academies taught should first be unlearned.
                                     ‘Disegno’ and the Signs of Artistic Creativity   


. Polyvalent Interpretants, Open Codes: The Problem of Reference
   and the Extension of Artistic Creativity from the Work to the Con-
   ditions of its Reception

In the process of modernity, artistic creativity has been formed essentially as
the installation of the random, (Reck ) encoding of the new, generating
elements of surprise, and modifying perception and reception that is not
retrievable in a stereotyped way. (Reck b) This cultivated a median sphere
of creativity (or to be more precise, a generative conception of creativity as
oriented on innovation and the above–average) for which art has outstanding
models, experience, and proposals to offer. Something that lends itself to
presentation as an interface for the entire image–rhetorical effects and ramifi-
cations of complex and polyvalently encoded works, can always be looked at
and described from both sides: from the viewpoint of reception and of pro-
duction. The decisive factor is that in the th century, particularly since ,
all work aesthetics has become reception aesthetics, which, in the process of
completion and appropriation of the polysemous and polyvalent artwork,
organises the ever more complex relationships between author, work, and
recipient as a continually changing web of regulated and partly de–regulated
factors; that is, develops within the work and as the work by means of the
constant back–and–forth of regulation and de–regulation.
    In this way the artistic experience set into the work articulates concep-
tually the problematic (of metaphysics) of the referent, outlined at length
in semiotic theory. The place of the no longer tenable, ontologically naive
embodiment of the real — image, reference, incorporation, etc. — is taken
over by polyvalent and ambivalent interpretants, and in masses at that. The
function of the interpretant to interpret, that is, the organisation of the sign
function that passes over to the interpretament necessitates the opening
up of the material constituting the work that was hitherto oriented on the
ideal of the perfect form. The artwork ‘opens’ itself commensurate to the
multiple layers of its conceptual predispositions (by means of corresponding
encodings by the author), but is activated as ‘real,’ as valid, each time a
recipient appropriates a work.
    The recipient’s perception is the prerequisite — as has always been —
not only for the vivid effect of an artwork; here it is also decisive for the
specific semantic organisation of a reference of the artwork because its
message orients itself on the recipient’s predispositions and disposition,
interests, predilections, and capabilities in a certain situation, and arises only
at the actual moment that the artwork has an effect on the recipient. (Reck
: –, –, –) The theory of the ‘open’ work of art (Eco
) is an important proposal that offers the possibility to describe the
consequences that result from this as well as the associated requirements.
      Hans Ulrich Reck


     Against this theoretical backdrop, art can be defined as a process and
method for generating improbability; that is, asymmetry, deviation, and dis-
equilibrium. All forms of art, as art works or objects, derive their aesthetic
validity from the fact that they can be viewed from many perspectives. Triv-
ially, an artwork is considered as being realised exclusively through the act
of contemplation, even when this takes place virtually. The conceptual and
semiotic system of reference established through the advent of land art, mini-
mal art, conceptual art, and especially happenings, Fluxus, and action art (on
a meta–level) implies that the understanding of ‘open’ art has changed. At
issue is the constitutive circumstance that poetic elements first generated in
the act of interpretation have been introduced which are prefigured in but
are indeterminate or ‘open’ parts of an artwork or musical score.
    According to this view, aesthetic information always originates through
the difference between what is determined and what is not under the
condition that there is, as far as possible, a majority of non–coded com-
pared to known signifiers. Aesthetic innovation of significative improbability,
therefore, conflicts deliberately with established codes and rules of commu-
nication, particularly with the recipient’s habitually encoded knowledge of
rules. Taking the ‘new music’ scores by Luciano Berio as an example, which
leave the arrangement of some of their constituents to the improvisation of
the performers, Eco explains:

     The new musical works [. . . ] reject the definitive, concluded message and multiply
     the formal possibilities of the distribution of their elements. They appeal to the
     initiative of the performer, and hence they offer themselves not as finite works
     which prescribe specific repetition along given structural coordinates but as ‘open’
     works, which are brought to their conclusion by the performer at the same time as
     he experiences them on an aesthetic plane. (Eco : )

    Analogously, works of visual art are seen as the sum of interpretations
enabled by the work’s formal organisation: “Informal art is open in that it
proposes a wider range of interpretative possibilities, a configuration of
stimuli whose substantial indeterminacy allows for a number of possible
readings.” (Eco : ) This is true of “an ‘open work’ in an even more
mature and radical way,” as “its signs combine like constellations whose
structural relationships are not determined univocally from the start, and
in which the ambiguity of the sign does not [. . . ] lead back to reconfirm-
ing the distinction between form and background. Here the background
itself becomes the subject of the painting or, rather, the subject of the
painting is a background in continual metamorphosis.” (Eco : ) In
general the work of art is changing into an “epistemological metaphor.”
(Eco : ) But actually this is a rather vague definition because the recur-
sive performance of art (that is, its feedback association with the permanent
                                        ‘Disegno’ and the Signs of Artistic Creativity    


reorganisation of the term in the course of the th century that tied the
work of art to meta–theoretical assertions or at least to comparable supposi-
tions and allusions) consists in the continuous shift, including of metonymic
strategies, as well as the inexhaustible interplay of the polyvalent interpre-
tants that runs the risk of being repetitive. In the face of infinite semiosis of
ultimately unsatisfactory metaphorising, Eco thus elects to attribute to art
the ability to incorporate epistemological shifts: “The open work assumes
the task of giving us an image of discontinuity. It does not narrate it; it is it.”
(Eco : )
    Eco’s reflections on the open work of art represent an important pre–
stage for the later post–modern accentuated theorisation of that increasingly
essential entity — the observer. Even before the euphorically greeted instal-
lation of alleged or real ‘interactive’ possibilities, the ‘emancipation of the
observer’ was decisively accentuated in terms of art theory. It appears to be
a consequence of all metaphysical bonds of art disintegrating as well as of
an ‘erudite irony’ that delights in contemporary mannerisms and succeeds
in transcending the doctrines of the modern era in favour of polyvalence,
inconsistency, and various types of ambiguities. Whether as a celebration
of eclecticism or, stronger, as paying tribute to the indissolubility of the
antagonism of codes and rhetoric, as a demand for immanence in which
polyvalence persists intact albeit under the sign of ‘the return of the sub-
lime,’ Jean–François Lyotard sees the emancipation of the observer from
the work of art as marking a definitive turning point in the development
of contemporary art and, therefore, also as a paradigm of a regenerated
critical philosophy after the modern period, which he describes as having
abandoned self–reflection and self–editing.
    While preparing for the ground–breaking exhibition Les Immatériaux
(The Immaterials, Paris ) Lyotard wrote the following:
   The purpose and even the destiny of artworks is questioned. The dominance of
   techné placed works of art under multiple regulations — that of the studio model,
   the schools and academies, shared taste among the aristocracy, a finiteness in art
   that had to do with illustrating the glory of a name, divine or human, and attaching
   to it the perfection of a cardinal virtue. The idea of the sublime put all of this
   harmony into disarray. (Lyotard : f.)

   Decisive was the new orientation on the recipient, the changeover from
the work to the audience:
   Thoughts on art would no longer have much bearing on the dispatcher of artworks,
   whom we would leave to the solitude of genius, but on the recipients of these
   artworks. It would henceforth become necessary to analyse the ways in which
   audiences could be affected; how the recipient receives and experiences works of
   art; and how works of art are judged. This is how aesthetics, the analysis of the
      Hans Ulrich Reck


     amateur’s feelings, came to replace poetics and rhetoric, which were didactic forms
     intended specifically for the artist. The question was no longer: How does one
     make art? But: What does it mean to experience art? (Lyotard : )


    Thus, engaging with works of art in general is fraught with many dif-
ficulties for internal reasons; that is, because of the specific endeavours
of modern artists and the corresponding qualities of their works. These
difficulties are of the variety that are to be expected as well as those that
come as a surprise; they may be part of exploring the rules of art or belong
to the type that unceasingly seeks to redefine the limits of the rules. Firmly
established conventions, developed over the course of centuries by small cir-
cles of art connoisseurs, render the notion plausible that art has an essence,
conceived as its nature, and that this makes an appearance solely at the level
of the individual artwork, but without really being comprehensible to the
ordering and classifying intellect.
    It follows from this that the work of art clearly and always has to be
a provocation of the senses; it must preserve and attest the order of the
harmonious interplay of senses and reason, and at the same time breach
their fixation on the beautiful from time to time in order to attain the
sphere of the transcendental, conceived as the sublimity of a world above
human beings which is essentially inaccessible to formalistic orders. The
sensual presence of the work delineates a realm of immanence but one
that instrumental rules cannot be inscribed in. (Genette ; Genette )
These and many other difficulties have a hidden common denominator, a
constitutive vanishing point: the well–established conviction that what art
is comes about through the chain of generations of empirically existing
artworks, and everything which can be made accessible to theoretical
understanding, evidenced through the life of the works, has to be derived
as an absolute principle from the singularities of their empiricism. This
also has a trivial side: with the materiality of the things, what does not
exist divests the rules of their objectifying opponent which renders them
accessible to view for others.
    Not trivial, however, is the reverse, which operates in this argument
as subreption: only that which occurs as an empiric totality, a separately
identifiable entity, or characterisable dimensions is meaningful. Following
this assumption art’s knowledge — in the double sense of genetivus subjec-
tivus and genetivus objectivus; its cognitive achievement and its penetrating
reflection — is reduced to perception. The plea for empiricism proceeds on
the theoretical presumption that the reception and apprehension of works
of art primarily, or even exclusively, takes place on the level of perception.
In this way a type of human interpretation is privileged to such an extent
that other modes of cognition are effectively dismissed.
                                    ‘Disegno’ and the Signs of Artistic Creativity   


    However, if — and this approach follows the semiotic construction de-
scribed here from which the theory model ‘art’ develops systematically, and
which can be observed historically, step by step, in the th century on the
trajectory of autonomisation of modern art and aesthetics as the reflection
of execution and representation that ranges as far as self–positioning as
genuine, irreducible cognitive faculty — if works of art can articulate and
meet cognitive demands at all, then they definitely transcend the sphere of
perception. If perception, communication, and consciousness are exclusively
mechanisms of observing and interpreting, then there is no reason for a
paradigmatic commitment of the interpretation of works of art to percep-
tion. It would then be perfectly appropriate to look at the effects exerted by
art in the light of the theories of semiotics, rhetoric, and communication —
as articulation of appropriation, as reception, but also from the prefabricated
elements and intention of the influence of one or several combined drawing
models/sign models on the perceptive apparatus of the observer of art.
    In our analysis, in terms of creativity theory the extension of the work
to include receptive dispositions and the entire arrangement of the effects
on the observer is both central and significant; that is, the semiotic change
in the relationship author–work–reception also changes the ‘intention’ that
was formerly ascribed to the author, the genius of the invention and disposi-
tion of an idea and a work. At the modified level of polyvalent interpretants
one can no longer understand ‘intention’ as the act or the mindset of the
artistic consciousness with regard to an object that is to be formed and
elevated to a sign of art. Intentionality and intention are not factors of
consciousness, and particularly not of any individual mind.
    Intentionality is a fabric of conditions that can be understood as interpre-
tive formulations of solutions to problems the precepts of which are none
other than the cultural conditions obtaining at a particular moment in time,
in so far as these are conceptualised in terms of semiotics/sign theory and
prepared as objects that have undergone a complex process which works
towards polyvalence. Thus intentionality references more than a binary
relation. In this context signs of art are intuitive and synthetic, but at all
events they are communicative form precepts for possible interpretations of
a cultural problem complex that can only be effected through construction
(of a model, notion, anticipation), which in turn — obviously — cannot
emerge without an interpretive definition. Intention is a process of mediat-
ing between these form precepts and problem precepts. This also means
that nothing is more important or tangible for the development of art than
that which is commonly known as ‘tradition;’ tradition as a model of the
handing down of elements whose continuance cannot be changed through
this instrumentalisation, indeed, cannot even be affected.
    This process requires sustained objectifications not only of the aesthetic
    Hans Ulrich Reck


components (taste, etc.) that can be installed in the work, but also of rules,
codes, designations, and methods. Accordingly, the works of art and images
can themselves at times be regarded as apparatuses that ensure contextual
variations. (Reck a: f.) The contexts are not created in a general
history of culture or non–specific environment and then transferred to
images; they are present in these, and not only as the condition of the
possibility of actualisations for the outside, but are themselves an incorpo-
ration of it. It is for this reason that art can be considered as a medium of
communication, which communicates through images and as images and
not simply through its transmission and translation into verbalised content
or gestures. This capacity leads to a specific ‘linguisticality,’ but it is by no
means incomparable or confined to art. On the contrary: its particularity is
especially suitable to elucidate what underlies all communicative processes
that operate via strings of images and signs.
    A further consequence results from this: the binding, multiple, flexible,
and polyvalent relation between work, author, perception, and interests of
the recipient is not only epistemically dominant but also in terms of the
genesis of the work and the aesthetics of reception, has implications for the
hitherto leading views concerning the artistic image and its mimetic ability
with regard to its visual representation of reality. For this multiple relation
can no longer be substantiated as the reference or representation for the
model of identificatory vision, that is, the interrelation between the visible
world and the visualisation of a world understood iconically and in respect
thereof, is also no longer productive. Whereas Nelson Goodman critiqued
this view of an iconic identity or ‘strong reference’ through deconstructing
the concept of realism, (Goodman : –) the break–up of the synthesis
between the visual order and the visualisation of a depiction by means of
the epistemically false suggestivity of identificatory vision leaves an empty
space behind, which categorically forces the reference to be abandoned.
    The ‘painting as a window,’ a stereotype of artistic design praxis ever
since Leon Battista Alberti, but also the contemporary historically most
‘advanced interpretation,’ gave way to a complementarity of the constructive
setting–in–motion by means of increasingly polyvalent interpretants. This
results in permanent opportunities for a stronger, meta–theoretically more
significant feedback between the recipient’s horizon and the opening of the
work. The indeterminate appears to be nothing less than the substitute/proxy
for the referentially vacated empty space, and marks a complementarity that
is at least ambivalent. With this the process of encoding and decoding the
elements of the work takes up the central position in aesthetic reception.
    In light of the evolution of the indeterminate opening of the work of
art, the models of the genius of the artist and the nobility of the image
of the artist in the coordinates of mimesis and virtuoso illusionism, ap-
                                   ‘Disegno’ and the Signs of Artistic Creativity   


pear obsolete. Historical interest in the artist as genius gives way to the
individualisation of concepts, the multiplicity of artist–roles, as well as the
expectation of a performative presence of the artist in the work for the
purpose of continual and explicit conveyance of the ‘authentic’ by the artist.
Not least the generative, creative process, the development of artistic praxis,
is also opened polyvalently just like the models of expression, the concepts
of the work and its effect. The idea that works are adapted to a certain form
of praxis is an essential prerequisite for modern art. However, their partic-
ularity, which combines exemplarily with the strengths of the individual
artist, has always been absorbed and synthetically reinforced in universalist
poetics and sign theories, that is, in a modern period/modern art that is gen-
eralisable. And now the empty space of the shattered reference is assumed
by the ‘register,’ as a linguistic term and a generative concept.
    For our purposes here, Roland Barthes noted, decisively with regard
to an a priori of the work, the medium, that authorship is important per
se and the individual author is a dispositionally integrating factor for the
unity of language, writing, and signs: “Once the Author is distanced, the
claim to ‘decipher’ a text becomes entirely futile. To assign an Author to a
text is to impose a brake on it, to furnish it with a final signified, to close
writing.” (Barthes : ) Thus the open work systematically rejects the
last signifié. ‘Reading’ must now be done without either telos or a vanishing
point. The implications in a creativity theory context can be expressed in
the following formula: For the strong author of a ‘closed’ work of art, the
more emphatic the author the stronger the text; for the weak author of an
‘open’ work of art, the less visible the author the more open the text.
    Now it is no longer the author but the web of signs, their linking and
flowing, that in the final analysis is decisive. According to Barthes the writ-
ten, hitherto the most influential medium of authorship– and subject–
determined language, has been replaced by écriture and inscription. Inscrib-
ing permanence arises in a new way. Or at least texts and images from
authorially generated works do not mean the retroactive notations of speak-
ing or living that has gone before, but are and remain the decisive act of
writing itself. An authority outside of the text or image does not exist.
    Once again this results in a shift — this time of greater magnitude —
of the coordinates between medium and author. Using the cited example
of language, in an incisive fashion that has frequently been misunderstood,
Roland Barthes drew consequences for all concepts of ‘the work’ from
the circumstance that the form and process of semioses, language, image,
and medium now implement the determinations and indeterminations in
a work and relegate the author to being merely a co–participating organ
or organon of language. However, this does not effectuate constraints on
nor does it mean an affront to the authority of the author, which is often
      Hans Ulrich Reck


accentuated incorrectly. Rather, as Felix Philipp Ingold has explained with
admirable clarity on a number of occasions, the author has undergone a
poetic radicalisation through becoming aware that he/she is the decisive
material of the linguistic, visual, or media process. (Ingold : –;
Ingold : –, –)
    The ‘media–tised’ author and the open work of art are two sides of
the same coin in a process where a shift in the poetic construction and
poetological constitution of a work is effectuated by the reader or observer.
The self–understanding of the author is as a rite of passage and as custodian
of the realisations that run through him/her:
     The disappearance of the author consists in the fact that the mute things of the
     extra–literary world are no longer discussed in the transitive form, as in the styles
     of realism; rather, they are made to speak through the intransitive form by the
     author adapting himself to them, in a sense lending them his voice. (Ingold, Steiger
     : )

   The poetological arguments of the open work of art confer an impor-
tance on the recipient that cannot be mistaken for the obsolete view of a
sheer illimitable interpretation by polyvalent interpretants. It concerns a
media–related reflection, which has turned away from the instrumental
artist who knows and calculates everything beforehand, and now sees the
realisation of a work as consisting in the artist merely divesting him or
herself of what had been thought up ahead.
   It is in this post–classical aesthetics that we find the root of the ten-
dency to valorise the observer–reader. This is not random; it belongs to the
poetological disposif of the development of art since the late th century.
     One does not have to go so far as Maurice Blanchot, for whom the recipient of an
     artwork is actually its creator. The process of the creation of a work, its endless
     coming–into–being, would then be left entirely to the observer or reader. “The
     reader makes the work; in the act of reading it, he creates it; he is its true author.”
     [Blanchot : ] Thus according to this the ‘true author,’ l’auteur veritable, is
     the active and creative ‘art participant’ who realises the meaning of the work, or
     the work as constitution of meaning, whereas the actual author, disempowered by
     Blanchot, is designated as the person who keeps the work and its meaning in the
     subjunctive open for the recipient as an artistic text. (Ingold, Steiger : )

    Yet this is only justified because in the text or the image the organisation
of signs is designed with respect to this openness. It is this that corresponds
to the differentiated intention of the ‘open artist.’
     In general poetic discourse tends to avoid unambiguity, to obscure meaning, and to
     weaken statement and message or avoid them altogether. However, when meaning
     vanishes, there is a growing need for interpretation, and therefore, the authority of
                                       ‘Disegno’ and the Signs of Artistic Creativity   


   the reader increases, who then assumes responsibility for the formation of meaning
   and thus for the ultimate justification of the work as open and non–conclusive.
   (Ingold, Steiger : )

    The media that transport these linguistic, visual, or media–generated
processes, however, are no longer generalisable, only determinable situa-
tionally and casuistically on a case–by–case basis. Artistic creativity, viewed
along the trajectory of this decisive dynamic, necessarily realises itself from
a certain point of development (the attainment of a certain maturity) in the
installation of the random. No wonder, then, that chance has become the
logo of the modern age/modern art. Art still — this is the lesson learnt
from the fact that it continues to be the paradigmatic field of creativity
— metonymically adheres to its own initial conditions and refuses to ad-
mit the iconic reference, the metaphysics of the referent, as well as the
self–sufficient, recursive, non–finite metaphor.


. Creativity as a Paradox and the Re–orientation of Art as an Episte-
   mological Basis for Exploring the New: A Brief Outlook

If we draw conclusions or ‘lessons from history’ as well as from the above
outlined transition from modern to post–modern art theory against the
background of the ‘open’ work of art, and if we give our findings more
pointed emphasis, then it can be said that:

    a) The expectations placed in the ‘creative’ have been detached from the
       arts and have become broadened, habitualised, and standardised in
       everyday life, whereby the creative is now a resource for social, semi-
       otic, and media distortions/registrations of all kinds; (Heubach )
       the role of the aesthetic recipient of artworks, which was continually
       enhanced and expanded in the th century, is the most important pre-
       requisite for this; the sphere of art is increasingly becoming a resource
       for everyday stylisations, encodings, and recodings in mass culture;
    b) The question posed by the arts as to the intrapsychological vitalisa-
       tion of the individual has passed over to reflections on innovations
       with respect to the sciences; that is, to changed horizons of expec-
       tation; (Hofstadter ) in line with this is the historically earlier,
       thus definitely preparatory, transition from the work to the observer
       as the most important poetological, not only interpretive but also
       constructive authority;
    c) It is not a matter of an intrinsic order that has split off from all other
       orders; order and disorder are relative and aspectually connectable;
    Hans Ulrich Reck


       they can be valid situatively as arguments and as heuristics; they
       cannot be separated clearly or ontologically. For the issue is always
       the re–organisation of hybrids of order and disorder; (Bohm :
       –) in this view creativity is not something substantial but a practice
       and a method that one can understand in the focus of the visual arts
       as ambivalence–stabilisation for a time, integrated in a process of de–
       and re–structuring, de– and re–contextualising, de–hierarchisation
       and re–hierarchisation; creativity is tied to structure as well as being
       momentarily an enemy of habitualisation; however, it is not evidence
       of the absence of order per se. (Bohm : )

    Therefore, indicators of creative processes are: disregard for perceptions
and evaluations that were hitherto applicable, deferment for a period of time,
virtualisation, trials and rehearsals. “Only when obscurity and ambiguity
prevail does one remain alert [. . . ] as in a labyrinth [. . . ]. Only then does
one ponder what comes next instead of asking about origin and meaning.”
(Ingold, Steiger : )
    For this the experiments of the arts are still one of the primary re-
sources, whose fundamental function is not distinguishable from the not–
yet–paradigmatic regulated and reglemented processes of basic research in
the sciences. (Kuhn ; Kuhn ) However, the paradox remains that
is always a hallmark of creativity, the new, the original, the surprising, the
continuative. “Indeed, to define originality would in itself be a contradiction,
since whatever action can be defined in this way must evidently henceforth
be unoriginal.” (Bohm : ) Yet as the visual arts possess outstanding
experience with such self–contradictoriness, with the transition of works
and hybrids to paradoxes and processes, they continue to be a framework
of orientation as well as a resource for the issues discussed here regard-
ing a creativity–theoretical irresolvable ambivalence of the work of art. In
the field of the arts the only danger factor is the intentional consigning of
practices to quiescence in overarching fetishes or end products.
    Paradoxes cannot be avoided, only demonstrated, staged, or ‘comple-
ted/processed.’ On a temporal level it is paradoxical to think simultaneously
of before and after as reverse sides of something. When paradoxes are
irresolvable, then each paradox is also a starting point for modifying the
edifice of knowledge. The transition from paradoxical to hybrid — and, vice
versa, in the other direction — is unavoidable and characteristic of new play
spaces for artistic experiments. The evolvement of the paradoxes of culture
in the form of theatricalisation is without doubt connected to the crisis of
representation, the crisis of certain aspects of signs.
    The transition from paradoxical to hybrid, which is viewed here as in-
evitable, suggests that the authority of the observation should be abandoned
                                       ‘Disegno’ and the Signs of Artistic Creativity   


and the participation in changeable parameters of stagings/mise en scènes
should be instated in place of a dissociated sphere of non–tangible processes.
Thus the place of registering distinctions should be taken by experimental
(and interactive) action from which ever more distinctions emerge than
from those that have just been observed and can be organised within an
isolable sphere of objects. Ambivalence does not come about of its own
accord, but only as a dynamic and property of real action in the field of exper-
iments itself, which in the area of the visual arts are always at once theory
experiments, conjoined with the design or disegno since time immemorial.

                                                                          reck@khm.de

                                                       Translated by Gloria Custance


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