Aesthetics and art criticism in Jean-François Lyotard

Abstract

The article examines the relationship between aesthetics and art criticism in Jean-François Lyotard. It shows that in the comments to the works of Barnett Newman, Arakawa; Adami; Daniel Buren and Karel Appel, among others, the author affirms the possibility of an "aesthetics of the material presence". It points out that the criticism of the works of these artists allowed Lyotard to advance in his critique of representation, inasmuch as the works of these artists would show in the immanence of the pictorial form that the essential of painting is not the expression of the subject nor the naming of the object, but the "invocation of the material presence". Faced with the works of these artists the artist would be asked: "Will something happen?" We also show that in this characterization of art as "presentification of the impresentiable," the author singularly mobilised the sense of the sublime in Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Schiller. We also see that Lyotard conceived in his art criticism different levels of tension between the "art of presence" and the "work of memory" performed in the artistic form, calling the latter one of perlaboration (durcharbeiten)  - as in the "dialectics of material" in Theodor Adorno. Finally, we emphasize that the works commented on by Lyotard can not be subsumed by the paradigm of communication, as its participants would experience in the experience of the indeterminacy of language the "community of a lack", thus rising against the "exorbitant beauty "In the society of technoscience.