Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History

by Karen Lang

Writing in 1940, the prominent German art historian Erwin Panofsky asked, How, then, is it possible to build up art history as a respectable scholarly discipline, if its objects come into being by an irrational and subjective process?" In Chaos and Cosmos , Karen Lang addresses the power of art to resist the pressures of the transcendental vantage point-history. Uncovering the intellectual and cultural richness of the early years of academic art history in Germany―the period from the 1880s to 1940―she explores various attempts within art history to transform aesthetic phenomena―chaos―into the cosmos of a systematic, unified field of inquiry. Lang starts by examining Panofsky's approach to aesthetic phenomena in his early theoretical essays alongside Ernst Cassirer's contemporaneous publications on the substance and function of scientific concepts (and on Einstein's theory of relativity). She then turns to the subject of aesthetic judgment through a rereading of Kantian subjectivity and Kant's uneasy legacy in art history. From here, Lang considers the different organizing theories of symbolic form proposed by Aby Warburg and Cassirer, as well as Goethe's inspiration for both; Alois Riegl's notion of age value and Walter Benjamin's conceptions of the aura; concluding with an extended examination of objectivity and the figure of the art connoisseur. Extensively illustrated with works of art from the Enlightenment to the present day, this venturesome book illuminates an intellectual legacy that has profoundly shaped the study of the history of art in ways that have, until now, been largely unacknowledged. Addressing the interplay of chaos and cosmos in terms of history, art history, philosophy, and epistemology, Lang traces shifts in point of view in art history and the way these shifts change aesthetic objects into historical objects, and even objects of knowledge.

Genres: Theory

312 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 2006

Reviews

[Duncan Berry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this — primarily the chapter on Goethe, Warburg and Cassirer — to amplify my grasp of Warburg's employment of Friedrich Theodor Vischer's concept of the symbol.

It appears that Warburg and his protege Edgar Wind devised a model of semiosis based on Vischer's 1887 essay "Das Symbol" that is astonishingly similar to that developed by Charles S. Peirce in the years leading up to his 1907 breakthrough (as discussed in Peirce's Theory of Signs).

It remains merely a tantalizing possibility, though we know for certain that Wind came to learn about Peirce during his American visit as a faculty member of UNC from 1925 to 1927 through contact with the young Sidney Hook and consequent exposure to Morris Cohen's amazing 1923 anthology of Peirce's writings published under the exquisite title Chance, Love, and Logic: Philosophical Essays.

I think I will certainly be reading, or at least scanning, the other chapters on Riegl and Panofsky as well.

An edited version of the 1887 Vischer essay has been recently released in the Berndt/Drügh collection Symbol - Grundlagentexte aus Ästhetik, Poetik und Kulturwissenschaft, pp. 200-214.