Event, Eventing, Eventuality: An Artistic Dialogue

For the title of the thesis - Event, Eventing, Eventuality – I have borrowed terms coined by Gadamer and Heidegger. Event refers to Gadamer’s argument that “all encounters with the language of art are an encounter with an unfinished event.” Accordingly, a work of art can never exhaust its subject-matter. Here Event refers to the artworks and the issues it raises. Eventing is a term Heidegger gave to the process by which an artwork evokes in viewers layers of connotations and implications, which would take them beyond themselves and beyond the ‘horizon’ of their current historical position. For Gadamer ‘horizon’ is the background understanding of a person when experiencing a thing. Fusion of horizons occurs in a dialogue between interpreter

The ‘unintelligible’ works of artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Arnold Schoenberg or Paul Celan have prompted him to wonder how can such art “exert a claim upon us as powerful and as authorative as that of the classical or traditional works” In The Relevance of the Beautiful he says that the arrival of enigmatic art forms, such as abstract and conceptual art, atonal music and hermetic poetry has been a “genuine revolution.” The insisting presence of such works of art has inspired him to ask “how it comes about that the work addresses us.” Gadamer’s hermeneutic is concerned primarily with what it means to understand something whether it is another human being, an artwork or a natural phenomenon. Whereas the unintelligibility of so much of modern art has challenged the validity of the all encompassing hermeneutic understanding he has envisioned, the hold these art forms exerted on viewers have convinced him that they are indeed a communicative event of sorts. Moreover, their unintelligibility does not negate his notion that works of art are indeed a hermeneutic phenomenon. In a genuine, attentive, encounter with art, he suggests, something happens to the perceiver. The object of art addresses the world in its absolute ‘otherness’. It is an authentic event despite being

Even though an individual’s response is subjective, hermeneutical aesthetics focuses on interpretive incompleteness as part of the way human, viewers of artworks included, are in the world. An artwork is always experienced in the present from a particular present point of view and its interpretation is the transmission of meanings across time. In this way the artworks discussed in this thesis bear witness to particular historical events and allow for possible projections of those past events into the future. Contemporary life is permeated with a diversity of visual information. In such an atmosphere the hermeneutic approach provides a way of understanding the applications of the meaning we make of visual input. In light of it, the responsibility of both artist and viewer is among the issues discussed in the last part ‘Beyond Horizons’. Here the perspective moves to weave together the threads of ideas and issues that have been identified in the ‘Fusion of Horizons’ section, and reflects on aspects that reverberate beyond the shifting possibilities within the