On Dialogue as Performative Art Criticism

Abstract

On various occasion, Jean François Lyotard employed the dialogue as a narrative technique when discussing works of visual art. While the conversations with the painters Jacques Monory and René Guiffrey are filmed conversations around their work, in What to Paint? (1987) and Karel Appel. A Gesture of Colour (1998/ 2009) Lyotard invents imaginary voices that debate the creation and the experience of painting. The following paper interprets the various implications of this strategy of polyvocality as a dramatization of the art critical discourse. Considering that criticism has often shifted between description and prescription, Lyotard confronts the reader with a different position, namely the theatralization of the differend that emerges through the gesture of painting. The reflection on art can no longer be a discursive doubling of the visual, thought constituting the visual sensations objects (of culture) distinguished from other objects (of use). To the contrary, the reflection on art opens itself to the stupefaction that the visual brings about. While art history proper introduces visual painting in a narrative structure where artworks unfold like a characters in a script, the writings of Lyotard attempt to transform the structure of all writing on art. The art critique is no longer a voice that describes or judges the work of art but a plurality of voices where contrasting arguments are interchanged but not synthesised. Further, these stupefied voices dramatize the intensive impact of colour, touch, timbre and matter onto the soul. Art criticism becomes performative and aesthetics turns into a dramaturgy so that the figural force of painting affects the tone and the reflection on painting.