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beyond aesthetic and anti-aesthetic THREE MINIATURES maria Filomena molder 1. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses (New York: Paulist Press, 1978). 2. See Klein, La forme et l’intelligible: Écrits sur la Renaissance et l’art moderne (Paris: Gallimard , 1970). Art cannot exist, in my reading, without the continual temptation to take its inner practice and see it as part of the world —Jay bernsTein (seminar 2) Image, Simulacrum, and Combustion He that loves that which is visible, and believes that what he has seen is only an image of that which he has not yet seen, feels a desire growing within him, a desire born out of his love for the visible, to enjoy what he hasn’t seen: the origin of the image—he who loves seeing longs for it. In this admirable manner Gregory of Nyssa in The Life of Moses1 stressed the paradoxical nature of any image: in trying to preserve itself, it discovers its own promise of perishing, its combustion into that which has never been seen, into its original image. In fact, he who wishes to purify the simulacrum risks being turned to ashes. What, therefore, is an image? A natural effect and/or an (an)intentional presentation , which follows the light and is sensible to light: a shadow, a reflection in water, dust, a dream, a story we tell about our life. And if we set off in search of the shadow which obscures this particular shadow, in search of the dust which rests on all the settled dust, in search of that which remains to be said, which is about to be, which is imminent or which has been said and lost or which is trying to be said to us and we do not understand, in the whole story told about our life, we will then be in the field of influence of original imagery. From this comes the attractive force that unites the images, the shadows of all bodies, the grains of cosmic dust, as does the rainbow the colors. Artistic Intention and What Obscures the Art From the moment that art deliberately wanted to be avant-garde, it chose, as a project, to reject everything that, according to Robert Klein,2 obscures art: the model, the work, the image, the human process of fabrication, wit, and beauty. Even if it doesn’t follow this entire program, and even if it is in conflict with it, it is no longer possible for art to suspend the disturbance of one or more of those forms of obscuring, that is, that which is outside the sphere of Beyond the Aesthetic And the Anti-Aesthetic 146 3. See André Leroi-Gourhan, Le geste et la parole, 2 vols. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964–65). conceptual communication. This disturbance may be summed up in the importance taken on by “what that an artist means,” his intention. It is difficult for the artist’s intention not to suit that which may receive it—whatever that may be—but above all it is difficult for it not to suit that which is in the state of being emptied of intentions. Some loss of magic is inherent to this emptiness, as is anything else. Artificial Shelters and Meteorology Let us start again in a different way. In one of the precious definitions by LeroiGourhan ,3 the human being is the mammal that spends the most time in artificial shelters. Each of these artifices secrets its own meteorology; for each one there is a certain weather. I see works of art as one of these artificial shelters. ...

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