Misko Suvakovic 
Advocates: Art and Philosophy * 
Approaching the 'Relations' of Philosophy and Art in the 20th Century 
Introduction: Advocates 
There exist quite different and incomparable cases of the relation between 
* The lecture entitled »Advocates: Art and Philosophy. Approaching the Relations of 
Philosophy and Art in the 20th Century« was given in collaboration with dancer and 
philosopher Jill Sigman. The paper that is now before you wasn't read; I presented to 
the audience its main theses instead. During my talkjill Sigman performed an improvised 
dance. Between the dance and the speech there were some necessary and some incidental 
correspondences and reactions. 
I began my talk with an introduction that was not written down and was therefore 
'advocating' my relation towards presentations by other participants of the congress. 
Here is a written reconstruction of this introduction: 
Who am I? I am not Boris Groys, Mikhail Epstein, Komar and Melamid, or NSK. 
My grandmother was a story-teller. She liked to tell private and public stories. I am a 
story-teller and am telling public stories. Her favourite story was about my grandfather 
and his schoolmates, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and, maybe, Adolf Hitler. I am not sure if 
this was a true story. She said that my grandfather and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and, maybe, 
Adolf Hitler, attended the same primary school.... Why I am tellingyou this? Why am 
I returning to narrative speech? 
Today, here and now, my task is to return philosophy and aesthetics to thinking and 
speaking. I have to separate them from the 'paper' (text) and return them to the 
body, thinking and voice. And I do it in the way as this was done by Ludwig Wittgenstein, 
for example, or in some other way, by Martin Heidegger. Wittgenstein once said 
»Philosophy is hell to me!« And just now, in front of you and for you too, to think and 
speak in English about 'advocating' between art and philosophy is hell for me too; I 
show you my hell. The hell of my thoughts and my mind. My task is to return voice and 
thought to philosophy, to return the body to it. 
Our task was to return voice and body to philosophy, wasn't it, Jill? This was Jill Sigman, 
the dancer and philosopher. I thank her for her endless assistance. Thanks to all of 
you! 
And this was the introduction. Later, someone from the audience asked why I returned 
to family stories and why was I telling the story? One possible answer would be that because 
this is the way of building history and tradition - these are the mechanisms in which 
postsocialist cultures build a phantasm of their own reality. I come from such a world 
(from the world of dramatic and tragic postsocialism) and reveal to you the relation of 
the voice to the body. Then another person noticed that the body of dance and voice 
of the lecture were in contradiction, that they took the focus away, be it from dance or 
voice (the spoken word). I hope my answer was clear, that the relation between the 
Filozofski vestnik, XX (2/1999 - XIVICA), pp. 111-126. I l l 
Miško Suvakovič 
art and philosophy, and it is t he re fo re , accord ing to Morris Weitz,1 
unnecessary to give generalizations of a certain relation between art and 
philosophy in order to explain some other relations which are quite different 
and incomparable. I shall designate these different relations with the vague 
term 'advocating' which can, among other things, designate the following: 
(i) The use of art in philosophy or the use of philosophy in art in the 
manner in which philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that »the 
meaning of a word is its use in the language.«2 Similarly the painter 
Marcel Duchamp claimed that by the ready-made he called the choice 
and the naming of an ordinary and mundane object an artwork.3 
(ii) The claim, closely related to that of philosopher Louis Althusser, that 
philosophy doesn ' t possess its p rope r object of cogni t ion, bu t is 
constituted instead as the subject of the desire, as a realm of combat, 
domination and intervention. It therefore does not exist as a domain 
of knowledge, but is, instead, an advocate of politics in the domain of 
science, separating the imaginary from the scientific, etc. 
(iii) Identification, description, and explanation of 'activity' instead of 
pointing to the ontological disciplinary essence. Thus the poet Charles 
Bernstein claimed: »Another traditional distinction between philosophy 
and poetry now sounds anachronistic: that philosophy is involved with 
system-building and consistency and poetry with the beauty of the 
language and emotion. Apart f rom the grotesque dualism of this 
distinction (as if consistency and the quest for certainty were no t 
emotional!), this view imagines poetry and philosophy to be defined 
by the product of their activity, consistent texts in the one case, beautiful 
texts in the other. Rather, philosophy and poetry are at least equally 
definable not as the product of philosophizing and poetic thinking, but, 
indeed, as the process (or activity) of ph i losophiz ing or poet ic 
thinking.«4 
(iv) It could designate Jacques Lacan's definition of signifiers: »The signifier 
is something that represents a subject for another signifier,« or: »For 
one signifier every other signifier can represent a subject,« or: »One 
body and the voice was external to the effect of the 'paper ' (text) and that I worked 
with difficulties in concentration - with confrontat ion among thought , voice and body. 
' Cf. Morris Weitz, »The Role of Theory in Aesthetics«, in J . Margolis (ed.), Philosophy 
Looks at the Arts (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), pp. 150-153. 
2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), § 43. 
3 Michel Sanouillet , Elmer Peterson (eds), The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp 
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), pp. 32, 141-142. 
4 Charles Bernstein, »Writing and Method«, in Content's Dream. Essays 1975-1984 (Los 
Angeles: Sun&Moon Press, 1986), p. 218. 
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Advocates: Art and Philosophy 
signifier represents a subject for all other signifiers.«5 In other words, 
'an artwork is something that represents a subject for all other artworks'; 
'an artwork represents subject for philosophical discourse'; or 'a 
philosophical discourse represents a subject for all artworks'; or: 
(v) To point to the relation between art and philosophy resembles the 
situation of a legal proceeding (trial) in which 'advocates' speak in the 
name of the accused as well as the victim , but also in the name of the 
metatext which is represented by the 'people', the 'sovereign', 'God', 
'universal justice' or ' truth'.6 
Such options are but a preparation for approaching the examples of 
'advocating' art and of advocating 'philosophy'. 
An-Artxvork Precedes the Discourse of Philosophy 
It is often claimed that an artwork precedes the theoretical (philo-
sophical) discourse. The starting point is the belief that an artwork is an 
expression or an effect of an individual, intuitive and original artistic act of 
creating. Art emerges from the 'opaqueness' of artist's intuitions. The painter 
Jackson Pollock said that an artist creates as nature does. According to Charles 
Harrison, »In this voice, the individual artist is celebrated for that wilful 
extension of cultural and psychological boundaries which he (or very rarely 
she) achieves in pursuit of newness of effect. Thus, for, example, the work 
of the American 'First Generation' painters, and particularly of Pollock, is 
associated with the l ibera t ion and purif icat ion of art 's resources of 
expression, and with the possibility of a greater spontaneity and immediacy 
in painting.«7 In this model an artwork is described as being similar to nature 
(a natural object, situation, or event). An artwork is thus external to the 
theoretical or philosophical discourse. 
Philosophy (theory) (a) names; (b) describes and translates from non-
discursive into the discursive; (c) explains the intentions, the concept, or an 
artwork in relation to another discourse; (d) mediates in the communication 
within cultural frameworks; and (e) interprets what cannot be enunciated 
of the artistic the 'sensual', 'material' or 'vital', highlighting what can be said 
and enunciated in philosophy. The philosophical or theoretical discourse 
appears as an excess of meaning, sense and value in relation to an artwork. 
5 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), p. 819. 
6 Names such as Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Wittgenstein, Rorty spring to mind. 
7 Charles Harrison, »A Kind of Context«, in Essays on Art&Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 
1991), pp. 4-5. 
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Miško Suvakovič 
At the same time the ontology of the work (of the art) and the ontology of 
the discourse (of philosophy) are two different and incomparable 'worlds 
of existence' which can only partially be brought into a certain descriptive, 
explanatory and interpretative cor respondence with the aid of a third 
metadiscourse, that of philosophy on philosophy and on art. 
An Artwork and the Public Metatext of Culture 
An artwork exists in relation to the public metatext of culture. The 
starting thesis is that an artwork is a human and social product which, by 
this very fact, engenders and carries specific (differential) meanings. These 
meanings are not something originating in the artist or in the object that 
he / she made or in the 'mirror nature' of the object in relation to the world, 
but originating in the necessity that what an artist has made is in a certain 
'intertextual relation' with cultural metatext(s).8 In other words, a painting 
by Caravaggio or Kandinsky does not represent the world, i. e. a musical 
composition by Haydn or Schoenberg does not express the human spirit or 
emotions because it resembles 'the world' or 'spirit', but because it is in an 
intertexual interpretative relation with the public metatext of an epoch or a 
civilization0 or in relation to particular texts of a certain culture, an art, a 
philosophy, politics, a religion, or even, 'private languages' that after a 
certain time enter into the domain of cultural 'public language'. The relation 
between a cultural metatext and a particular artwork in 20th-century art is 
often not a stable and invariant one; one that would be legalized by a social 
contract. It rests, on the contrary, on a case-to-case basis and is open to 
transformations (to the 'penetration of the signifier into the signified'). 
The Artworld 
Art is not only an artwork, but an 'artworld'. In the mid-sixties Arthur 
Danto expressed a characteristic thesis about the ' transcendent ' nature of 
art. He wrote: »To see something as art requires something the eye cannot 
decry - an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: 
8 Jean-François Groulier, »Reading the Visible«, Art Press, no. 177 (Paris, 1993), pp. E l 5-
E17; Louis Marin, »Questions, Hypotheses, Discourse«, in To Destroy Painting (Chicago: 
The University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 15-29. 
9 In European tradition such a text is the Tes tament ; in countr ies of »real socialism« 
such a text was Marx's or Lenin's. 
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Advocates: Art and Philosophy 
an artworld.«10 In other words, art is not an object (a painting, a sculpture, 
a building) or a situation (an environment, a scenic arrangement, an 
installation), or an event (a musical artwork, a cinema projection, a dance), 
but a constitutive relation of an 'artworld' in which the very object, event, 
or situation appears as an artwork: »The world has to be ready for certain 
things, the artworld no less than the real one. It is the role of artistic theories, 
these days as always, to make the artworld, and art, possible. It would, I 
should think, never have occurred to the painters of Lascaux that they were 
producing art on those walls. Not unless there were Neolithic aestheticians.«1' 
Such an approach could be designated as 'transcendent' for it implies an 
'ontological' presence of an artwork as such by that which is not in artwork 
itself, although it is 'crucially overdetermining' it. Hence an African mask 
in the British Museum, Duchamp's snow-shovel or a porcelain urinal 
exhibited in the Georges Pompidou Centre or whichever painting by Henri 
Mattisse do not share common morphological characteristics which would 
constitute them as artworks: a mask belongs to the 'world' of ritual, a shovel 
was made as a utilitarian object (as a tool for removing snow), and Mattisse's 
painting was made as an artwork (as a painting appertaining to the realm 
of painting). 
All these cases are identified as 'artworks' only in that historical world 
which offers a specific (not any other) theory of the 'artworld' and the 
'artwork': a theory of existing (ontology), a theory of looking (reception), 
a theory of creation (poetics), a theory of interpretation (philosophy) and 
a theory of use (the use is a 'practical' phenomenal interpretation of the 
relation between an object, art, and philosophy). This continuum does not 
exist in other historical or geographical 'cultures', but only in the culture of 
Western hegemonic modern art in relation to religion, magic, politics, 
utilitarian function, etc. Arthur Danto therefore identifies his 'ontological 
art' by the following words: »My view, philosophically, is that interpretations 
constitute works of art, so that you do not, as it were, have the artwork, on 
one hand, and on the interpretation on the other.«12 
Transgression, Art, and Philosophy 
Avant-garde transgressions in art are 'deviat ions ' (subversions, 
10 Ar thur Danto, »The Artworld«, in J. Margolis (ed.), Philosophy Looks at the Arts, p. 162. 
11 Ibid, p . 164. 
12 A r t h u r C. Dan to , The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia 
University Press, 1986), p. 23. 
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Miško Suvakovič 
violations, disruptions, transitions, innovations, experiments, revolutions) 
in relation to the dominant hegemonic hierarchical power in art, aesthetics, 
culture, and society. In avant-garde art in the late 19th and early 20th century 
the avant-garde transgressions signified: 
(i) a critique (subversion) of the dominant (mainstream) institutions of 
the aesthetic (of the values of the sensual and of reception), of the artistic 
(of the creation of an artwork), of the existential (of forms of behavior, 
and the function of art in a specific historical society and culture), and 
of the political (of the model of carrying out of the social ideology as a 
power structure); and 
(ii) a projection of the 'new' as a dominant characteristic of the present 
(modernity) or the future (the Utopia of the optimum projection).13 
The avant-garde transgression is therefore the 'avant' of the dominant 
modern i s t cul ture and , s imultaneously, its i m m a n e n t cri t ic a n d its 
transgression in the name of the 'new' or 'different ' . 
The philosophy of'transgression' was anticipated by Georges Bataille 
who pointed to the two characteristic transgressions of the discourse of 
reason. The first transgression introduces lower elements (a cry, a howl, 
silence, failures). The second one points to the higher elements (provokes 
a symbolic code f rom within, problematizing the guarantees and the 
legitimations of sense). 
By opposing these two transgressions Bataille provoked and questioned 
the 'gap' (hiatus) between the high and the low. Jacques Derrida,14 following 
Jacques Lacan,15 suggests that transgression of the discourse rules implies 
transgression of the general Law. According to Battaile, transgression is an 
' inner experience ' in which an individual or, in the case of ritualized 
transgressions such as communal celebrations, the community transgresses 
the borders of rational, mundane behavior governed by profit, production 
and self-preservation. In transgression the power of the taboo manifests itself. 
Transgression employs the power of the forbidden (of 'crazy Law'). A 
post-Batillean definition of transgression includes: 
(a) subversion, disruption, rupture and revolution - literally, of subversion, 
disruption, rupture, and revolution in an individual existence; 
(b) a parody of transgression for, according to Marcelin Pleynet, »in our 
time, there is no more transgression, no more subversion, no more 
13 Cf. Aleksandar Flaker, 'Opt imalna projekci ja ' , in Poetika osporavanja. Avangarda i 
književna levica (Zagreb: Kultura, 1984), pp. 62-72. 
14 Cf. Jacques Derrida, »De l 'économie restreinte a l ' économie générale«, in Ecriture et la 
différence (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), pp. 373-384. 
15 Cf. Slavoj Žižek, Filozofija skozi psihoanalizo (Ljubljana: Analecta, 1984), p. 18. 
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Advocates: Art and Philosophy 
rupture,« only »a parody of transgression, a parody of subversion, 
simulacrum, a repetition of rupture;«10 
(c) the absence of the meaning; 
(d) matter devoid of metaphysics (bas matérialisme); 
(e) ecstasy and anarchy; 
(f) intervention of the body in the text (écriture corporelle); 
(g) a theory of the need for a deficit or a loss, but not a theory of a deficit 
or a loss; 
(h) sliding (glissement); 
(i) the fear of the sublime; 
(j) horizontal vs. vertical; 
(k) entropy vs. creation and production; 
(1) the lack of the sourceless and homelessness; 
(m) architecture against architecture; 
(n) eroticism; 
(o) opposition between perversion and normality, 
(p) functions of interpretation and the 'blind spots' that every interpretation 
reveals; 
(q) formlesnesss (inform, formless); 
(r) transparency; 
(s) an open work; 
(t) trauma; 
(u) entrance into a project; 
(v) transgression of bodily dimensions; 
(w) promised elimination of symbols, metaphors, and allegories, and 
(x) entropy of the sense.17 
Art and philosophy are thus nei ther two separate worlds nor two 
complemen ta ry ones. They are instead a realm of arbitrariness and 
transgression in relation to what emerges as the Law of art, or Law of 
philosophy, or Law in relation to art and philosophy. 
Representation of Art in Philosophy 
An indicative case is that of Heidegger, for he with the philosophical 
discourse, which is a picture (mimesis) of ' thinking' , points to art. The art 
10 Marcelin Pleynet, »Les problèmes de l'avant-garde«, Tel Quel, no. 25, Paris 1966, p. 82. 
17 Cf. Yves-Alain Bois, Rosalind Kraus (eds.), L'informe. Mode d'emploi (Vans: Centre Georges 
Pompidou , 1996), p. 7. 
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Miško Suvakovič 
that Heidegger speaks about is neither concrete historical art, nor an ideal 
(ideal figure) of the desired art. He speaks about art for philosophy's sake. 
It is art that is represented by philosophy within the language invented within 
philosophy, and which consists of the traces of philosophical metaphysics. 
Not without reason, Heidegger writes: »What is art should be inferrable from 
the work. What the work of art is we can come to know only from the essence 
of art. Anyone can easily see that we are moving in a circle.«18 
Or: »What happens here? What is at work in the work? Van Gogh's 
painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, 
win truth. This being emerges into the unconcealedness of its Being.19 Here, 
the pair of shoes painted by Van Gogh's hand is not in question. Neither is 
the fact that these are not the farmer's shoes, but those of the artist or of the 
artist's friend.20 The real shoes in the real artwork are in question. And a 
'real artwork' is not an historical concrete art, but the fictional (theoretically 
formed) artwork with the help of which philosophy for its own purposes (i.e. 
for the purpose of philosophical truth or speech about philosophical truth 
of art) projects the artwork which mediates for philosophy, or philosophical 
quest ioning the wariness or even hor ro r of the 'baseless' na tu re and 
'homelessness' ofWestern thought. 
Discourse of the Artists: From Van Gogh to Malevich 
Let me consider a specific story about theory and art, for example, that 
told by Lawrence Alloway.21 Writings by artists could be traced in the past 
up to the 15th century examples such as Ghilberti's Commentaries or Alberti's 
Treatise on Art. The first interview comes from thel6th century when Brendetto 
Varchi questioned artists (Michelangelo, Bronzino). In the 17th century 
artist's correspondence (Rubens, Poussin) and artist's books (Charles Le 
Brun) appeared. A polemic between writers (Diderot) and artists (Falconeti) 
is well known. In the 19th century artists wrote letters (Pissarro, Van Gogh), 
traveler-diaries or memoires (Hunt, Gauguin). Writings from the late 19th 
century are neither technical treatises, nor tractates, but a discourse in the 
first person by the artist about himself, art and the world. 
18 Martin Heidegger, »The Origin of the Work of Art«, in Basic Writings (San Francisco: 
Harper , 1977), p. 149. 
19 Ibid., p. 164. 
20 Cf. Meyer Shapiro, Selected Papers. Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, 
vol. 4 (New York: George Braziller, 1994), pp. 138-139. 
21 Lawrence Alloway, »Artists as Writers, 1: Inside Informat ion«, in Network. Art and the 
Complex Present (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), p. 208. 
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Advocates: Art and Philosophy 
What does this little story tell us? It points to specific changes in the 
status of the artist and his identity from the Middle Ages through the 
Renaissance to the modern age and modernism. Speaking schematically we 
could say that an artist in the Middle Ages was plunged into a Christian 
totalizing metalanguage, a legitimizing metalanguage which offered an 
unspoken and self-understandable continuum between the world, the artist, 
and the artwork. The abandonment in which the modern artist finds himself/ 
herself, an artist who is no longer plunged into the great unifying-homogenous 
metalanguage of the world, the society, and the power of religious totalizing 
transcendence, forces h i m / h e r to identify and advocate himself/herself. 
Michel Faucault wrote that the subject is a historical phenomenon.2 2 The 
'artist' is theoretically anticipated in the 19th century private writings (letters, 
diaries, correspondence, journals) of various artists. In the 20th century it 
is formulated as a pas tout metalanguage for specific use. (This use can be 
personal, as in an artist's poetics; specific, as in pedagogy; or specialist, as 
in philosophy of art). 
What, then, does 'theory of the artist' mean if we are aware that: 
(i) the idea of theory of the artist appeared in a certain epoch of art 
(painting, sculpture), and in a certain epoch of discourse (the way in 
which a thought was expressed, the way of producing a text); 
(ii) the theory of the artist is thought of and expressed as an idea, a concept, 
and a project in discourse which structurally and axiologically included 
certain relations between speech (and writing) and the appearance of 
an art object (object, situation, event); 
(iii) the theory of the artist is not just a secondary tool in the process of 
creating or producing an object, a situation, or an event (artwork), 
instead it is, primarily, in the service of establishing and making work 
an artwork, an artworld, and an art history. 
I will now point to the difference between the stage of discourse in the 
t ime when Vincent van Gogh wrote letters to his brother ,2 3 and the 
suprematist 'philosophy' of Kasimir Malevich.24 The letters are the 'speech' 
of the modern subject who is constituted as a hypothetically autonomous 
'Self in the domain of the necessity of identification of intuition, of the private 
nature of his existence and auto-poetic spelling o f ' t h e truth in painting'. 
Van Gogh becomes 'van Gogh' through parallelism of his practice, existence 
22 Michel Foucault , The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Science (New York: 
R a n d o m House, 1970). 
23 Cf. Ronald De Leeuw (ed.), The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh (New York: Penguin, 1996). 
24 Cf. T. Anderson (éd.), Malevich: Essays on Art 1915-1933 (Chewster Springs: Rapp and 
Whiting; London : Dufour Editions, 1969). 
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Miško Suvakovič 
and thinking. In Malevich's case the situation is rather different. He works 
under the circumstances of asocial revolution (first the bourgeois and then 
the Bolshevik), of decentred eclectic modernism and at a time of emergence 
of part icular discourses: that of the Bolshevik revolut ion, of l i terary 
theoretical formalism, of allegorical theosophy, and the discourse of a self-
observing autonomous modernist painter . In paintings such as »Black 
Square« (1913-15?) and »White on White« (1917-18) the fundamenta l 
practical (poetical) questions of suprematism are solved.25 
During the twenties Malevich posits theoretical questions which finally 
drove him out of art altogether, towards mediating the 'idea of suprematism' 
in relation to philosophy. 
His questions were: 
(i) the question of the science of painting (of a theory of the 'additional 
element'); 
(ii) that of an artistic education; and 
(iii) the question of the possible 'suprematist world'; painting, sculpture, 
architecture and applied arts that appeared in the twenties, are not art 
in its creative literal sense, but an attempt to show that the painting, 
sculpture, architecture and applied arts advocate the philosophy of 
suprematist world. 
The Troubles with Wittgenstein's Philosophy 
It is paradoxical that the great philosopher, who believed solved all 
philosophical secrets and paradoxes (in Tractatus), is today read and 
interpreted in the artworld and in the synchronically theoretical worlds (in 
criticism, aesthetics, philosophy of art) as a paradigmatic model of writing 
(écriture) in art.20 It is this example that I will discuss here. Wittgenstein's 
books Tractatus (1922) and Philosophische Untersuchungen (1953) are not 
written as poetical studies, books on the aesthetics or philosophy of art. On 
the contrary, they are written as books about the ultimate questions of 
philosophy, of philosophy which is akin to scientific thinking (that of the 
natural or formal sciences). But since Dada and Fluxus, i.e. from the end of 
the fifties (cf. notes by the painter Jasper Johns, ideas by the composer John 
25 »By suprematism I unders tand supremat ion of p u r e feel ing in visual art« - Kasimir 
Malewitsch, Die Gegenstandslose Welt (Berlin: Florian Kupferberg, 1980), p. 65. 
20 Cf., for example, Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein 's Ladder (Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 1996);Jorn K. Bramann, Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the Modern Arts (Rochester: 
Adler Publishing Company, 1985). 
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Advocates: Art and Philosophy 
Cage) through minimal and conceptual art of the sixties (cf. works by the 
painter Mel Bochner, choreographer Yvonne Rainer, conceptual artist 
J o s e p h Kosuth and the g roup Art&Language or the g roup Kod) to 
postmodern strategies of the seventies, eighties and nineties (cf. poetry and 
theory of the American movement i=a=n=g=u=a=ge poetry', film experi-
ments by Derek J a rman , 'deconstructivist ' prose by Kathy Acker), his 
philosophy is read in a quite different way. It could be said that this way is 
an asymmetr ical o n e in relat ion to the phi losophy unders tood as a 
philosophy of science. 
Let me offer some examples. Jasper Johns destroyed the critique of 
the modernist Greenbergian autonomous pictorial painterly plane (ranging 
from abstract expressionism to postpainterly abstraction) by introducing 
nonaesthetic conceptual relations between the words and the painting (i.e. 
painting »Fool's House«, 1962), modelling this procedure after Wittgen-
stein's discussion of the use of the word in his Philosophical Investigations. 
The instrumental power of taste (of Kantian judgement based on taste) is 
dramatically confronted with the critical powers of conceptual analyses of 
painting and of conceptualization of the manual-pictoral analysis of painting. 
Within the context of conceptual art Joseph Kosuth based the idea of 
working within art as a form of theoretical investigation of 'propositions' 
on the analogies with Wittgenstein's investigations of 'propositions' in 
phi losophy. 2 7 He saw his own artistic work as an art appropr ia t ing 
philosophical competences, as 'art after philosophy'. Art is thus defined 
thanks to the mediation of the language 'art games' which represents away 
of critical self-reflective healing of art from the illusions and illnesses of 
aesthetics as a phi losophy of taste. The confronta t ion of theory (i.e. 
Wittgenstein's philosophy) and art does not lead towards an understanding 
of an art work as a central element of art, but to art as an activity or explicitly 
as a practice of a specific conceptualization of the function of an artwork as 
the product and of art as a context of such a production. 
I would like to begin my discussion of the status of Wittgenstein's 
phi losophy within the interpretat ive frames of art by remarking that 
Wittgenstein does not offer a slogan or a statement which would support 
the beliefs (taste, intentions) of an artist or a theoretician of art, i.e. that he 
does not speak about art or artistic at all. But what is it, that Wittgenstein's 
philosophical writings do? It demonstrates how a self-reflective observation, 
analysis, discussion and production of a system of the 'language of art' are 
possible and how it is possible to represent art in a discursive manner for 
27 Cf. Joseph Kosuth, »Art after Philosophy«, Art after Philosophy and After. Collected Writings, 
1966-1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 13-32. 
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Miško Suvakovič 
art in relation to philosophy and theory. In other words, how philosophy 
advocates philosophy for philosophy. 
What Wittgenstein's philosophical writings offer art is an open analogy: 
how to observe, analyse, discuss, and produce, from within art, a system of 
an 'art language', i.e. how can art be discursively advocated in the name of 
art and in relation to philosophy and theory. This is the basis on which artists 
from the late fifties on raised the question of philosophy, but not within the 
philosophy that speaks of art, but in art (painting, music, dance, poetry, film) 
itself and therein started to employ the languages of art to speak about the 
na ture of their work (of the subject in the process) . Wi t tgens te in ' s 
philosophical work was a promise of such a paradigmatic approach: not to 
philosophize about philosophy, but to ask oneself and to demonstrate one's 
questioning by employing a special active language used by the speaking, 
writing, painting, sculpting, singing, playing, or dancing subject, i.e. and 
hence advocates for other 'texts' of culture and history. 
From an Inquiry into Music to the Theory at Work 
Arnold Schoenberg carried out an ex t raord inary revolut ion: he 
questioned the tonal system and offered a creative and theoretical answer 
to it with the idea of atonal music. What I am interested in here is the 
intertextual relation of his discussion of music with his composing. This 
relation is not a philosophical one and directed against aesthetics as it was 
understood at the end of the 19th and in the beginning of the 20th century: 
»If I should succeed in teaching the pupil the handicraf t of our art as 
completely as a carpenter can teach his, then I shall be satisfied. And I would 
be proud if, to adopt a familiar saying, I could say: 'I have taken f rom 
composition pupils a bad aesthetics and have given them in return a good 
course in handicraft '.«2S Carl Dahlhaus29 thought that Schoenberg discarded 
the metaphysical discourse of musical beauty as unnecessary, and offered a 
quite different discourse on music: a discourse of pedagogy, that of a musical 
theoretician, a discourse of musicology, of a composer and, of course, a 
discourse of advocating a conceptualization of the metamorphosis (a 
deconstruction) of tonal into atonal music. However, Schoenberg is a real 
modernist for his theory is an autonomous 'system' of articulation of a discursive 
28 Cf. Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 
1983), p. 12. 
29 Karl Dahlhaus, Estetika muzike (Musikästhetik) (Novi Sad: Knizevna zajednica Novog Sada, 
1992), p. 5. 
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sense which follows after the creative musical act and is exterior to it. 
Schoenberg's work is autonomous in relation to his discourse, and his discourse 
is a discussion of music exterior to music itself, an almost scientific discourse. 
In John Cage's music30 the process is quite different from the forties 
until the nineties, for therein we see theory at work. His work leads Cage 
outside of music. Music hence develops as an 'extended activity' which can 
exist in an intertextual relation with music of the Other, of other arts or 
discursive forms of expression and representation. 
What is created as a theoretical discourse could be described as: 
(a) 'Metamusic' - Cage speaks of a fundamental transformation of musical 
ontology ( intent ional expression with sounds) into a theoretical 
discourse on music which is realized in the location and under the 
circumstances in which the performance of a musical work is expected 
(the intentional creation of sounds). It appears as if the music advocates 
a certain 'philosophy' or 'theory' within the context of music in relation 
to the philosophical and theoretical discourse that is exterior to it. 
(b) 'Lecture poetry ' - Cage speaks of the displacement f rom one art 
discipline (music) into another (poetry). This poetry is not just any 
poetry but that of the avant-garde sort, in which the poetic (expressive) 
character of the discourse is confronted with fragments or traces of 
m e t a l a n g u a g e on art , politics, existence, re l igion, and textual 
production. 
(c) 'Textual production' is the production of a text which is neither music 
nor poetry, but 'textual productivity' in art. To claim that a text is 
productivity (let us approach this definition gradually, first f rom 
outside, through its normative aspect) means that textual letter (écriture) 
presupposes, as its tactic, the defeat of the descriptive orientation of 
language and the emergence of a device that creates conditions for a 
full development of its generative capability.31 In other words, a certain 
text of art advocates music for other texts of music, other arts (poetry, 
literature), theories of art and culture, philosophy, etc. 
And yet another difference! Schoenberg builds his autonomous metatext 
on music which has a relatively consistent s t ructure of descr ipt ion, 
explanation, and interpretation. The 'discourse of a composer' is constituted 
in the interspace of a differentiating discourse of music, musicology and 
30 On Cage see, for example , Marjorie Perloff, Charles J u n k e r m a n (eds .), John Cage. 
Composed in America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994);John Cage, Silence 
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1967). 
31 François Wahl, »Autour d ' u n e critique du signe«, in O. Ducrot & T. Todorov (eds.), 
Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 445-446. 
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Miško Suvakovič 
philosophy. Cage, on the contrary, presents the productivity of the text as 
an open eclectic intertextual relation between: 
(a) a letter (écriture) from 'music as an artworld' which through artistic 
procedures (of a certain open and undefinable discipline of repre-
sentation, expression, and acting) takes over the voices of a religion as 
a world of existence (Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki), 
(b) politics as world of existential and behavioral beliefs (David Thoreau) , 
and 
(c) philosophy as a world of procedures in language (Ludwig Wittgenstein). 
But what does appropriating the VOICES of religion, politics and 
philosophy signify? This is neither the postmodern citation (an arbitrarily 
appropriated and quoted voice of the Other, taken from the archive or a 
labyrinth of textual hypotheses), nor a modernist explication of slogans 
(statements, beliefs or discursive verification of an act). It is instead an act 
or action performed within a text, an analogy of a performative act or speech 
act. It is therefore possible to speak, in the case of Cage's texts ( le t ter / 
écriture/) or lecture (speech), of ' theory at work'. The meaning of a certain 
text, of the »Lecture on Nothing« (1959),32 for example, is nei ther the 
meaning of a text as a closed system of consistent meanings, nor closed 
meaning of a text which establishes arbitrary or necessary relations with other 
texts of art, culture, or theory. It is a meaning of the words that gain their 
meaning by the performing act (of writing down, speaking out, of mentally 
representing, semantically, syntactically, or of typographically advocating in 
writing or in reading). 
The Entryway Between Philosophy and Literature 
In Jacques Derrida's writings there is no equivalence between literature 
and philosophy, between writing in literature and writing in philosophy. 
Instead, there is an open and postponed promise: the promise of a 'close' 
(intimate) relation between literature and philosophy, or the promise of 
crossing the entryway which separates philosophy and literature. 
What is philosophy if not thinking? The answer could be, for example: 
philosophy is writing. But where is the 'source' of writing, and what does 
writing demonstrate? To whom or to what does the writing show itself: to 
the thinking, the spirit, the other text - to the very writing - or to the essence 
of writing, the essence of philosophy? Heidegger might have said: »We ask 
about the essence of art.« If we return from Heidegger to Derrida, the answer 
32 John Cage, »Lecture on Nothing«, in J o h n Cage, Silence, pp. 109-127. 
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is posited as a 'flow of questions': »What is literature? And first of all, what 
is it ' to write?' How is it that the fact of writing can disturb the very question 
'what is?' and even 'what does it mean?' To say this in other words, (...) when 
and how does an inscription become literature and what takes place when 
it does? To what and whom is this due? What takes place between philosophy 
and literature, science and literature, politics and literature, theology and 
literature, psychoanalysis and literature? The question was doubtless inspired 
in me by a desire which was related also to a certain uneasiness: why finally 
does the inscription so fascinate me, preoccupy me, precede me? Why am 
I so fascinated by the literary use of the inscription?«33 The questions are 
not jus t about the 'inscription', they are the inscription 'performed' in such 
a way that it is not possible to separate clearly the inscription (writing) of 
literature from the inscription (writing) of philosophy. What is at stake is 
no t the diachronic play of questions and answers about the primacy of 
l i terature or philosophy, or whether literature becomes philosophy, or 
whe ther phi losophy by its letter (écriture) crosses the entryway of the 
inscription of literature. The production of inscription is the question at stake 
here, which causes the complex nature of the differentiation between the 
'sources' and 'outfall' of the inscription or leaving the trace (of writing). 
No, this is not the epochal turn of philosophy in pre-philosophical or post-
philosophical writing of prose, poetry or essay. It is the 'unstable inscription' 
at the entryway between philosophy and literature. 
Conclusion 
What do these examples, and there could have been many more, 
demonstrate? A critical and suicidal relation between art and philosophy 
or, on the contrary, an ecstatic and eclectic richness of the 'pleasure in the 
senses' (jouissance) of the possibility of advocating art and advocating 
phi losophy, or a nomadic displacement f rom 'one possible world of 
advocating' into 'a possible world'? At a time when nothing is self-evident 
when it comes to art and to philosophy, some of the relevant questions are: 
- How to define and describe openness, the specific nature of examples, 
and eclecticism or nomadism so that we acquire a systematic view of art 
and philosophy?34 
33 Jacques Derrida, quo ted in David Carroll, Paraesthetics. Foucault LyotardDerrida (New 
York: Methuen , 1987), p. 83. 
34 Heinz Paetzold, »How to Bridge the Gap between Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics of 
Nature . A Systematic Approach«, Anthropos, no. 3-4, Ljubljana, 1996. 
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Miško Suvakovič 
- How to show that our 'baselessness and homelessness'35 are a 'normal ' 
human condition? It is not just now that it became evident that nothing 
which has to do with art is evident by itself, even its right to existence.30 
Nothing that has to do with art or philosophy was ever evident by itself. 
- How to be an 'advocate' in relation to a signifier which advocates a subject 
for another signifier, or for all other signifiers? 
- How is it possible HERE and NOW to destroy with one 's mortal and 
vulnerable body the 'advocating' or 'mediating' screen of the signifieds37 
which separates art and philosophy, and then to face one's own experience 
of the destruction of that break? 
35 Martin Heidegger, »The Origin of the Work of Art«, p. 149. 
36 Theodor W. Adorno, Esteticka teorija (Ästhetische Theorie) (Beograd: Nolit, 1979), p. 25. 
37 Roland Barthes, »Rasch«, The Responsibility of Forms (Berkeley: University of California 
Press, 1991), p. 308. 
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