Art’s episteme since modernism was in abstaining from prophane reality of utilitarian profit. Art has voluntarily got rid of its sensuous entanglement with reality and event since romanticism and onwards; the formalization of a concept, of an idea or of a theoretical stance was its cornerstone. Yet, in the post-conceptual art activities of the latest 15 years, the neglection of reality and event – advocated hitherto by the modernist and conceptualist practices – is now often seen as a drawback. This explains art’s recent overlapping with storytelling, theater, music, moving image, dance and various forms of performativity, in which it tries to shift from former conceptual discourse and theory towards senses, emotions and narratives. However, the paradox is that art’s recurred interest in reality, sociality, narration – its attempt to deal with the event – more often ends up with dissolution in pop, mass and techno cultures, or in theorizing sociality with hardly any access to the event. Now, when the necessity to transmit the story or the event acquired importance again in post-conceptual practices, art found itself without the vocabulary to accomplish this goal. Within the institutional system and poetics of contemporary art it is problematic to regain the vocabulary of sensuousness which in pre-modernist art facilitated the grasp of reality and event.
In Hegel’s aesthetics sensuousness was the main feature of the classical art of Greek antiquity and of the modern age from Renaissance up to Romanticism. In that case the idea and its sensuous corporeal configuration are shaped in accordance with one another. As Hegel argues, in the art from these periods the idea does not hover over materiality as in Romanticism, or later in modernist art and, further in conceptualism. Spirit appears sensuously and in its body, simply because it is by means of sensuous embodiment that the spirituality can be manifested as “the truly inner self,” and not as an abstraction. As we remember from Hegel’s aesthetics, when these sensuous means wither away – when art no longer applies them with the aim of obtaining ‘truth’ – then art itself ends and the goal of pursuing truth is delegated to philosophy.¹

Thus, art’s dismissal of sensuousness and its mistrust of reality and event has led artistic practice to abstraction and conceptualization since the beginning of the 20th century, which – even in its radical, affective forms after the 1960 – adhered to theory, conceptualization and self-sublation. Self-sublation implies that art finally rid itself of aesthetics and its dependence on the audience and established itself as an institution that reflects on its own self-abolition. Malevich’s Black Square (1915) or Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) put an end to aesthetic genealogy of art, so that art shifted to the kind of phenomenology, which would exist ‘under the gaze of theory’ (Groys).² Self-sublation remained art’s institutional episteme even when it extensively engaged with social, political, scientific or ecological issues or various forms of research and activism.
However, once art, in its attempt to speak about reality and event, deserts its conceptually grounded domain, it dissolves in the mass-cultural form of narration, which either tries in vain to regain aesthetic pleasure and fast empathies, or it imitates the research-based investigations and reproduces the social critique. In this attempt to entangle back in reality, art cannot relearn what it voluntarily unlearnt with modernism – sensuous engagement in reality and hence the vocabularies of grief and the lexicons of tragedy, upon which sensuous engagement with reality stood. In other words, stepping away from its own modernist and avant-garde legacies and institutional history, art, in its post-conceptual turn, cannot regain sensuous involvement with the reality, that it possessed before its modernist turn. As in that case, art de-links from its principal canon of institutional self-reflection and critique, which epitomized modernism, avant-gardes and conceptualist achievements. But committing this move in numerous present post-conceptual attempts, art is not able to regain its pre-modernist sensuous lexicons of speaking about the world and the event either.
Of course, dismissal of sensuousness in art had a tremendous impact in the context of modernist and avant-garde epistemes, when it entailed art’s radical self-sublation, conceptualization and abstaining from capitalist reality, academic aesthetics, enjoyment, pleasure. However, with art’s recent return to narratives and storytelling, the former modernist dismissal of pre-modernist sensuousness of modernity, loses its value. This is because art, in its attempt to desert its institutional canon, remains with two losses at once: it remains with its loss of sensuousness which it chose during modernist turn, but at the same time art deprives itself of all the radical conceptually grounded gains, acquired due to self-sublation and institutional self-reflection. This is why it is important not to confuse the pre-modernist forms of sensuousness still belonging to Modernity(!), and the new post-conceptual meta-modern trends – the techno-cybernetic, pop-performative and identity-oriented activities – which claim the post-conceptual attachment to sensitivity, but are rarely prone to engage with the event.

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As mentioned above, grief is one of the behavioral syndromes that triggers the sensuous engagement with the event. Performance of grief has been the utmost realization of sensuous entanglement with reality in artistic practice. Freud in his “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) emphasizes the inability of the contemporary subject to grieve, and her inclination towards the melancholic ataraxia (indifference) instead, which tells on her social and cultural choices. As Freud shows, when the melancholic subject does not acknowledge the loss of the object or a person, this object gets internalized in her. Freud says that preserving the object, instead of burying it, is somehow dependent on the necessity for the melancholic to preserve the place of an object of attachment, even when this object dies or is lost. This is why the melancholic’s identification with that object is narcissistic as Freud repeats – i.e. the libidinal gaze, which the melancholic subject received phantasmatically from the lost object in order to construct her as the desired and valuable subjectivity, should be preserved at any cost. That’s why Freud writes that even when the object dies, the melancholic subject pretends that the libidinal tension with the lost object sustains. It is as if someone phantasmatically expected an amorous gaze from an empty air. Freud finds such a condition, characteristic for melancholic subject anomalous and calls it a clinical case.
He writes: “The narcissistic identification with the object then becomes a substitute for the erotic cathexis the result of which is that in spite of the conflict with the loved person the love relation need not be given up”.³
That is the reason why the loss of the other cannot be mourned, but only substituted by means of transporting the potential libidinizing gaze of the other into oneself. Meanwhile, mourning, conversely, reshuffles the bond with the lost other, it terminates the libidinal regime of this bond, and shifts it to the performance of grief.

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The tragic drama and music as its syndrome have been the inherent paradigm of the artist’s sensuous entanglement with the event. I intentionally do not use the term catharsis, as the latter is grounded more in perception than inception. Nietzsche, for example, applies another term instead of catharsis. In his Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music he mentions ‘aesthetic play’ to claim that the performative process in its inception and intensity differs from the cathartic response of the viewer.
Grief is the medium of access to event; but grief presupposes performing it. That is why performance of grief happens to be artistic (musical). However, performance of grief is not merely sadness or lament. It is not meant in the sense of merely empathy, but as an act of self-resignation in favor of imprinting the event onto oneself. Hence the resignation of perseverance of life and of selfish vitality in tragedy (which Freud regards as the acquiescence with the loss). In that case a ‘performer’ follows the dead to preserve him/her by symbolically repeating the event of dying, although s/he knows it is impossible to cancel that death. This performative repetition is artificial (‘beautiful’, ‘musical’, even when there is no music in it). For example, Antigone’s obsession to bury her brother and her readiness to die even despite being punished for that act, is not so much about heroism, but rather about the solemn resignation: her ceremony is caused by her entanglement in the event of her brother’s death. The burial, that she has to accomplish, is not merely an engravement of a corpse, but a spectacular, ‘beautifully” enacted performance. This spectacular act of performative burial is called by Lacan “the second death”, a symbolic “death” which is to be implemented as an act of “beauty”; because without the enactment of grief, the mourning would not accomplish itself. In this symbolic performance of resignation, the protagonist who is focused on the dead, might either actually die as the result of performing one’s act of resignation (as Antigone ultimately does), or only play dying symbolically (as Orpheus does after Euridice is cast back to Hades). For example, for Oedipus his self-blinding is both a symbolic “death”, an act of ‘beauty’, but also a resignation, – an act of symbolic circumcision. Similarly, after Aeneas decides to leave Carthage and to abandon Dido, he later consents to stay with her when seeing her despair. However, Dido, despite the awareness that it could ruin her, i.e. against her own will, insists that Aeneas leaves. By doing so, Dido resigns from what could have been favorable for her, for the sake of ‘nobleness’ of the deed. It is this relinquishment that, according to Hoelderlin, forms the caesura in tragedy as its principal element.⁴
What is crucial there is the act of resignation following hubris, or despite hubris (protagonist’s arrogance). Hubris never comes alone in the tragic play, it will always be accompanied by resignation. Hubris is triggered by destiny and necessity, whereas resignation suspends it by means of an ethical beauty of a deed. To fit the beauty of an ethical deed, the tragic protagonist recedes, or acquiesces, – the protagonist sort of ‘circumcises’ one’s interest, even when this might occur to be deadly for her. Interestingly, Derrida in his essay dedicated to his mother’s death and titled “Circumfession” (1993),⁵ builds his entire soliloquy on the act of the symbolic circumcision, converging two notions – circumcision and confession.

Thus, without resignation we would only have a ritual of mourning, whereas in a tragedy – in the artistic act – it is the ceremony of resignation which triggers a specific aesthetic and performative regime. Dido voluntarily dies when Aeneas leaves her in Carthage, but she does it in the frame of performative, symbolic, ‘aesthetic’ reaction on her loss. In this performance important is not hubris but the beauty of the performative act of resignation. Then the physical expiration of a protagonist, formed as dying, just follows that act.
To mourn means not simply to lament on something or somebody, but to symbolically become the subject of dying oneself. Thus, it is not hubris that makes tragedy, but rather acceptance of the loss (of the catastrophe) in the act of self-resignation. It is precisely this self-resigning move, that facilitates the regime of “aesthetic play” mentioned by Nietzsche. “Aesthetic play” implies a performative behavior in which a performer paradoxically switches to a supplementary, most unexpected artistic choreography, rather than deals with the given circumstances of the often catastrophic event. Such performance might express itself in musical or rhythmic deviations from regular speech, in sarcasm or humor, in any other post-verbal forms of vocalization or syndromatic choreographic conduct.
Grief, symbolic dying, tragic resignation and ‘aesthetic play’ used to be the forming elements of European art, music and dramaturgy, from the 1500s up until modernism. If European art ever demonstrated anything emancipatory at all, it was this effort of human resignation, by means of which it could be possible to resign from horror, hatred, hubris and cruelty, and do so in ‘aesthetic play’.

 

 

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