Aisthesis. Jacques Ranciere
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of waves on a calm sea.
The meaning of this radicalization remains to be understood. For there is a way of understanding this praise of calm a little too simply. Winckelmann had a polemical intention in publishing his History. He wanted to remind his contemporaries of the true models of beauty, drawing them away from the excesses of modern sculpture – that is to say, in his time, baroque sculpture: excessively extended or twisted bodies, faces distorted by the will to express extreme pleasure or pain. For him one sculptor embodied this perversion of art that our age, on the contrary, celebrates as the embodiment of baroque genius: Bernini. No more is needed to relegate Winckelmann to a certain role: he is made the retrograde guardian of a classical ideal of divine impassibility and beauty residing in pure lines and harmonious proportions. He would thus be the father of the neoclassical sculpture triumphant during the Napoleonic era, embodied by Canova’s frigid marble figures. Above all, he would be the father of the academic Greece of ‘calm grandeur’ and ‘noble simplicity’, frozen far from its own soil in Roman museums and in the minds of German philosophers. It was against this Greece that Nietzsche’s disciples, like Aby Warburg, raised a savage and tragic Hellas, making art, contrary to all glyptotheque Apollonianism, the manifestation of obscure energies that support and convulse the rituals and monuments of civilization at the same time.
But in order to oppose Dionysian energy to Apollonian calm, a certain Greece must already be constituted, far from all simple adoration of serene perfection. Winckelmann himself constituted its singularity by placing this torso, part of a body whose entire figure we will never be able to appreciate, above the divine form and proportion of the Belvedere Apollo. A mutilated statue is not only a statue lacking parts. It is a representation of a body that cannot be appreciated any longer according to two main criteria used by the representative order: firstly, the harmony of proportions – that is to say, the congruence between parts and the whole; secondly, the expressivity – that is, the relation between a visible form and a character – an identity, a feeling, a thought – that this visible form makes recognizable in unequivocal traits. It will be forever impossible to judge whether the arms and legs of the Belvedere Hercules are in material harmony with the torso of the hero, forever impossible to know whether his face and his limbs are in spiritual harmony with the traits with which the myths represent him. More radically, it will be forever impossible to know whether it is indeed Hercules who is shown by this statue lacking all the attributes that would make him recognizable. Yet Winckelmann nonetheless confirmed the opinion that the statue represents the hero of the Twelve Labours, and does so in optimal form, translating the highest degree of perfection of Greek art. Posterity did not miss the chance to take him to task for this: his successors made this ideal Greek statue into a late Roman reproduction, and one of them even transformed his Hercules seated among the gods into a suffering Philoctetes. But assuming there was an error about the identity of the person, it was not the result of naivety, but a coup. The exceptional fate reserved for this mutilated body does not betray a naive allegiance to an outdated ideal of perfection. Rather, it signifies the revocation of the principle that linked the appearance of beauty to the realization of a science of proportion and expression. Here the whole is lacking just as much as expression. This accidental loss corresponds to the structural breakdown of a paradigm of artistic perfection. Attacking baroque excess does not amount to defending the classical representative ideal. On the contrary, it shatters its coherence by marking the gap between two optima that it claimed to match together: the harmony of forms and their expressive power.
No doubt the declaration of this gap is not absolutely new. It is also the assessment of a long history. For nearly a century, artists, critics and academicians were confronted with the problem of how to match the ideal of the noble harmony of forms, formulated in the seventeenth century by theorists like Bellori or Félibien, with the expression of passion notably illustrated, at the end of the same century, by Le Brun’s physiognomic models. This was primarily a technical problem for students: How was it possible to imitate both the forms of studio models and the passions felt by characters to whom they lent their features, but which they had no reason to feel themselves? One must leave the studio to study the way passions are inscribed on bodies elsewhere. This elsewhere, for some, was the privileged artistic stage for expressing the passions – the theatre. But others objected that, in the best acting, painters would only find ‘grimaces, forced attitudes, and artfully arranged expressive features, from which feelings are excluded’.3 On the contrary, the street or the workshop allowed one to better observe the common man, not yet moulded to expressive conformity by worldly conventions. But how was one to reach bodies expressing the nobility of forms corresponding to beauty? The academicians responsible for establishing ‘the prize for expressive heads’, founded in 1759 by the Comte de Caylus, determined that one could not find models among men whose ‘baseness in outside habits and in their facial character made them incompatible with the study of beautiful forms that must remain inseparable from expression in this contest’.4 And the very Diderot who urged students to abandon the academies to observe real movements of the body at work, or praised the expressive attitudes of Greuze’s domestic tragedies, denounced the ‘ignoble’ faces the same Greuze gave his Septimus Severus and Caracalla in his 1765 Salon. Grand painting could not tolerate the living expression of a sly prince and an irascible emperor. Some had already solved the dilemma: the knowledge that neither theatrical convention nor the ‘naturalness’ of the common man could provide should be sought instead in the Ancients. For, like the sculptor of the Laocoön, they knew how to endow the same face with contradictory expressions never present in reality, except by unpredictable accidents, which the hand always arrives too late to copy. Winckelmann established the superiority of ancient models over ‘natural’ models, but he did not find it in the capacity to put the maximum amount of different emotions on the same face. Laocoön’s beauty does not come from the multiplicity of passions it expresses; it comes, instead, from their neutralization in the sole tension of two opposite movements: one that welcomes the pain and the other that rejects it. Laocoön offers the complex form of the formula, which takes its simplest form in the radical insufficiency of the Belvedere Torso: beauty is defined by indeterminacy and the absence of expressivity.
Such a response deserves attention. It effectively seems to go against the current of watchwords developed in the same era by innovators of theatre and dance. They wanted to elevate the truthful expression of thoughts and passions above formal principles of harmony and proportion. Four years earlier, the Letters on Dancing and Ballet by Jean-Georges Noverre had appeared in another German capital, Stuttgart. They targeted the tradition of court ballet, which, according to Noverre, was meant only for the demonstration of aristocratic elegance and the mechanical skill of the artist. This art of steps and entrechats was opposed to an art of physiognomy and gesture fit to tell a story and express emotions. At the time, the model for this art was provided by ancient pantomime, in which another theorist of dance, Cahusac, had recently saluted a language of gestures capable of expressing all tragic and comic situations.5 Two years earlier, Diderot’s Conversations on the Natural Son had also pleaded for the resurrection of pantomime, and opposed the emotional potential of the tableau vivant to the artifice of the coup de théâtre. What Noverre and Diderot proposed – and end of the century reformist dramatists, musicians, and actors, from Calzabigi and Gluck to Talma, would take up once again – was a revolution in representative logic, playing upon its internal contradiction. They opposed the organic model of action as body, ideal proportion, and the entire system of conventions linking subjects to genres and modes of expression, with the bare principle of mimesis as the direct expression of emotions and thoughts. To the conventions of the theatre and elegance of the ballet, it opposed an idea of art in which every bodily gesture and every grouping of bodies tells a story and expresses a thought. Noverre’s dancer-turned-actor and Diderot’s actor-turned-mime must display an art of total expression on stage, identical to the manifestation of an entirely motivated language of signs and gestures:
When dancers are animated by their feelings, they will assume a thousand different attitudes, according to the varied symptoms of their passions; when, Proteus-like, their features and glances betray the conflicts in their breast … stories will become useless, everything will speak, each movement will be expressive, each attitude will depict a particular situation, each gesture will reveal a thought, each glance will convey a new sentiment; everything