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Tuesday 8 December 2009

Aesthetics Debate 2 - The Sun Also Wiesings

Sorry, sorry, sorry, I will work on that pun (I won't).
This leads on from this post here.
We introduce Wiesing, who has no Wiki page! And very few mentions, even in German domains. I'll see if I can find some further biographical details in an actual book.
Could skyrocket my SEO ratings (among aestheticists). Wiesing decided that rather than look at the limited nature of paintings which Wolfflin's theory involved (mainly centred around Renaissance artwork in its examples, and involving a necessary historical circular progression from linear to painterly, closed form to open form, etc, and back again) he would open up the concepts.
Wiesing suggests an alternative to Wolfflin's metaphysics of history. He wants the concepts to be free of these historical constraints and open them up to apply to all Bildung: to find the "necessary conditions of the possibility of pictoral content". I want to stress here that while this seems to centre around art, it technically shouldn't and it is to some extent an oversight of the lecture that more images weren't included. For instance, images that bear continual importance, outside of their invention within history, such as a bar graph (linear, closed, planimetric etc) or a Rorschach image (presumably painterly, open form). Thus Weising took the concepts forward into a transcendental philosophical grounding.
At least so he hoped......
My examples there divulge the line of thinking he followed. The idea of the linear and painterly becomes a theory about mark-making - the transition between marks can be more or less distinct. The focus becomes the locatable relationships between marks, and thus a scale, with the image locatable on it, is created. Equally the planimetric and recessional still represents surface and depth, in which visual representation is necessarily spatial, and closed and open form would mean the two ends of the scale would be 'minimally' and 'maximally' ordered. The importance of the Bildlogik here is that it can be applied to ANY image. There's more but I have to do some other things, and I would also like Patrick to find the time to reply. HINT.

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