Cezary Woźniak

Spiral and Amplitude. Dialectic of Art

The article presents a certain dialectic of art, the dialectic developed on the basis of such concepts as essence, potentiality, completeness, sense and phenomenon. The completeness of art is hereby understood as the maximum actualisation of its potential, the pretence of art would be therefore something, in which the potentiality of art isn’t elaborated on. What would be the sense of art then? It would be the process of certain actualisation of art potentiality. The history of art then presents itself as the amplitude whose extents are drawn by the level of the actualisation of that potentiality; from the pretence of art to the appearance of immanence, the epiphanic experience of the omni-completeness. This might have been the most maximalist vision of art, which can be found, for example, in Schiller, Schelling, Heidegger or Chögyam Trungpa.

We can also imagine a different variant of dialectic of art, in which its story would have unfolded in form of a spiral. The history of art would then have been driven by the need for the realisation of its telos. It would have been the achievement of complete sense of art inherent to its concept, which may be derived from Hegel’s aesthetics.

Can this spiral and this amplitude be intersecting? And if so, how could this affect understanding of art? It seems that the dialectic form of spiral provides art with the terminological integrity, the possibility of its nominal creation, whereas the form of amplitude reinforces art as the epiphany of omni-completeness. Finally, the art would be the form of energy flow on the certain horizon, horizon of art; the form of flow into its condensation points of completeness; and the moments of transparency of this eternal flow…