Reproduction, Forgery, and Aesthetic Responsibility via Gadamer

¹

Thierry Lenain's book Art Forgery: The History of a Modern Obsession repeatedly describes the typical response to a forgery---an artwork that pretends a false origin---as anxiety, something that strikes deep to the core of aesthetic consciousness. In perhaps the most dramatic historical example, Paul Coremans, a Belgian art expert who testified at the trial of Han van Meegeren, stated after the forger claimed original authorship of Christ at Emmaus, perhaps Vermeer's most significant masterpiece, that "the art world was shaken at his foundations"². Forgery, thus according to André Malraux "sets the most disquieting problems of all in the philosophy of Art", because, seemingly pathologically, our appreciation for an art object seems to evaporate in discovering its 'authenticity' to be false. But how can this be an aesthetic judgement, at least aesthetic in the reductive sense, if nothing about the object itself has changed? As Lenain probes, "if an artwork as an aesthetic object reaches us by the channel of our senses, and if nothing at all has changed at that level but the label attached to the object, then what legitimates so radical a change of appreciation?"³ It would seem, on the surface, that our aesthetic response to an object can't help but intermingle with either historical prejudices, or as Lenain spends an inordinate time suggesting, Augustine condemnation of deceit.. These are, as Arthur Koestler argues in his essay "The Anatomy of Snobbery", "extraneous to the issue." I'd like to here argue for and legitimize, as it were, this rejective response, as engendered instead by a demand for something like "Aesthetic responsibility" I will sketch out such an ethical commitment out of a close reading of Gadamer's discussion on Bildung---and its relationship to the image---found in Truth and Method.

But first, I want to paint an exact picture of what a forgery, for my purposes, represents. Lenain calls attention to the problem of the "perfect double". As he writes, a large strand of art criticism has frustratedly held onto the naïve idea that all fakes can be detected eventually through aesthetic or even scientific investigation. But Lenain puts forward a "discursive hole" in that there is no theory in the tradition addressing the "simulacrum, meaning an aesthetic machine built to look like something else in such a manner that the very possibility of telling the original and the copy apart vanishes"⁴ This is the type of forgery I want to deal with, maintaining the caveat that someone has subsequently spoiled the ruse, identified one as temporally the 'original'. Does the reproduction, in this case, belong still to the category of art and does its aesthetic value diminish? Essentially, the perfect fake forces philosophically our investigation away from strictly object orientated analysis. But philosophic hermeneutics in the phenomenologal tradition has never utilized a strict metaphysics of presenc to understand our interpretive receival of the world before us. So, in what ways does a hermeneutic approach to art incorporate the forgery in its interpretive practice? Is a hermeneutic approach at all possible? It would seem it must bypass the strict aesthetic dimension and delve into the historical or cultural dimensions of art. For if we, in approaching a forgery, focus on a strict objective aesthetic, and if this object perfectly imitates the artwork of its pretended origin, then the interpretation will too in fact apply to the model and not its imitation, leaving any possible rejective impulse unexplained. Another dimension of the hermeneutic approach to a forgery would be to, as Lenain describes, bypass the "authorial structure". What he describes by this is not that one must know the author, but that works of art imply such an authorial origin. If fakes are artwork, if we relinquish our commitment to a delineation between the model and imitation, one would have to abandon completely the "authorial structure" as source for imputing meaning. I believe, as aforementioned, that the phenomenological hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer has an interesting approach to the problem in general, but also to these two specific dimensions of hermeneutic approach.

Gadamer essentially begins Truth and Method with a close examination of Bildung. Bildung, colloquially, is understood as something like education or formation, one that is necessary, as utilized in the literary genre of Bildungsroman, to enter into society. However, Gadamer makes a point to note that a certain understanding of Bildung developed historically that transcended culture as such:

Bildung here no longer means 'culture'---i.e.., developing one's capacities or talents. Rather, the rise of the word Bildung evokes the ancient mystical tradition according to which man carries in his soul the image of God, after whom he is fashioned, and which man must cultivate in himself.⁵

This exaggerated language evokes an immense importance for Gadamer's idea of humanism. However, Gadamer continues to state that in a brief examination of cross-language usage, the Latin equivalent to Bildung is formation, which has inevitably influenced philosophical interests in form or formation. This idea of form, Gadamer states, however, "lacks the mysterious ambiguity of Bild, which comprehends both Nachbild (image, copy) and Vorbild (model)."⁶ He continues to state that what is essential to Bildung is not the end product but the process itself, linking it to the Greek word physis. Bildung has for Gadamer, "no goals outside of itself" but rather is a genuine historical idea and, in connection to Hegel, has an inextricable relationship to Geist as Bildung represents for Gadamer man's "break with the immediate and the natural that the intellectual, rational side of his nature demands of him...It is the universal nature of human Bildung to constitute itself as a universal intellectual Being"⁷ Gadamer calls this rising to a universal a "task", such that it "requires sacrificing particularity for the sake of the universal" so that one might, "affirm what is different from oneself and to find universal viewpoints from which one can grasp the thing."⁸ As Gadamer states, to recognize one's own in the alien, to become at home in it, is the basic movement of spirit, whose being consists in returning to itself from what is other. This theoretical formulation of Bildung is connected practically to an engagement with humanistic domains such that, "all theoretical Bildung, even acquiring foreign languages and conceptual worlds, is merely a continuation of Bildung that begins much earlier."⁹ Abandoning the idea of absolute spirit, as Gadamer frequently does, he connects Bildung to the sense of tact which inspires a responsibility that follows a finitudinal characterization of human horizons. Tact, borrowed from Helmholtz here, includes within it an aesthetic and historical dimension: "One must have a sense for the aesthetic and the historical or acquire it." Most fascinating, the culmination of tact as culmination of the process of Bildung, allows someone to, "know what is possible for an age and what is not, and has a sense of the otherness of the past in relation to the present."¹⁰ Does this idea of Bildung as a universal responsibility in humanistic development explain our aversion to forgeries? I want to suspend this finalization and here briefly investigate the relationship one might draw from Gadamer's discussion on Bildung and his delineations between the copy and image in the section "The ontological valence of the picture". Tellingly, his dismissal of basic traditional aesthetics is "on the way to acquiring a horizon that embraces both art and history."¹¹ His two questions for what comes are essential for this present's work's investigation:

We are asking in what respect the picture (Bild: also, image) is different from a copy (Abbild)---that is, we are raising the problem of the original (Ur-bild: also, ur-picture). Further, we are asking in what way the picture's relation to its world follows from this.

The mention of 'original' implies a necessary examination of the temporality of art. Gadamer at one point asks, "What kind of temporality belongs to aesthetic being?"¹² Here, Gadamer argues that the ontology of the work of art lies inseparably in its presentation. Further, by investigating the repeatability of festivals and their celebrations, Gadamer argues that the presentation has the character of a repetition of the same. Here 'repetition' does not mean that something is literally repeated---i.e., can be reduced to something original. Rather, every repetition is as original as the work itself.¹³ Furthermore, he calls this kind of temporality, and its connection to the Being of Art, the most radical in the sense that it "...has its being only in becoming and return"¹⁴. The ramifications of this radical temporality is spelled out by Gadamer in his use of the term contemporaneous to describe ways in which a work, the hermeneutical object, makes itself absolutely present for its audience and does not "disintegrate into changing aspects of itself so that it would lose all identity", but rather, "in its presentation this particular thing that represents itself to us achieves full presence, however remote its origin may be."¹⁵ This is what Gadamer means when, in even "The Relevance of the Beautiful", he describes the work of art, even the improvising of the organist, as something that 'stands'. Again, and again, for Gadamer, it needs to be stressed that the hermeneutic event, and the aesthetic experience, is strictly that: an event, and as such occurs in the free play of human understanding. This is, from our Gadamer reading, what should be understood by Gadamer stating a "definition of the work as the focal point of recognition and Understanding".

But in this radical temporality are we not sacrificing what Tact provides us, namely, the intuitive rejection of art fakes as reductive? I'm not quite ready to abandon this commonsense aversion and suggest that the meaningful difference between copy and image help exonerate this reaction. Gadamer, in this more "exact" analysis, contends that, the "essence of the copy is to have no other task but to resemble the original."¹⁶ He instead reformulates the idea of the "perfect fake" as instead a "mirror image" that entirely loses its independent existence and instead re-presents the original Being of the forged, or copied, artwork. A successful copy thus either becomes ontologically its original, or

effaces itself in the sense that it functions as a means and, like all means, loses its function when it achieves its end. It exists by itself in order to efface itself in this way. The copy's self-effacement is an intentional element in the being of the copy itself. If there is a change in intention---e.g., if the copy is compared with the original and judgement is passed on the resemblance i.e., if the copy is distinguished from the original---then its own appearance returns to the fore, like any other means or tool that is being not use but examined.

I quote this in full to suggest that the Gadamer's ontology of art if accepted makes total non-issue the idea of the "simulacrum" in terms of aesthetic comparison, because a perfect copy would thus become in the sense of the repeated presentation, perfectly the original. This passage, however, also points to the source of our discomfort at forgeries: their revealing themselves as not art, but failed means of representation. The task of perfect reproduction is not a task of Bildung, but an insularized task towards the particular image it would like to copy. Thus, I think, the explanation for our rejection of revealed forgeries is that they do not contribute to the task of Bildung examined earlier, which as Gadamer states, is not a final product but a process. The unauthorized forgery in this context represents a non-participation in the universal task that is Bildung. It deviates from the progression of aesthetic and historical Spirit. Tokenized as a mere copy, it falls from artistic investment to gift-shop commodity. Thus, we tend to side with T.S. Eliot who wrote in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture that something can be achieved only once but done often, subsequently.