Buch Peter Weibel: Art as an Act of Cognition

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) introduced the term Werkmeister (master artificer) in his The Phenomenology of the Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes, 1807) in order to distinguish himself, with his analysis of the modern version of creation as work, from the fuss about geniuses among the rhymers and rhetoricians of early Romanticism. The master artificer is characterized, on the one hand, by a connection to the creative activists of all earlier cultures, who did not as yet know the role of the autonomous artist and scientist, but relied on techné, that is, the knowledge of how something is accomplished. In the ancient world, the patroness of artisans and builders, of writers and sculptors, of preservers of regional heritage and civil diplomats, was therefore known as Pallas Athene in Greece and as Minerva in the Roman Empire. She lent people the strength to finish a task. That is difficult to understand today, when every jack-of-all-trades believes he knows how to rise above Aristotelian dramaturgy. In truth, these pseudo-modernists have merely lost the energy and ability to bring every beginning to an inevitable conclusion that results from it; indeed, it is wonderfully convenient to pass off every inability as disinclination and to attribute haphazard sloppiness to a program of openness and equality. To thunderous applause, the open work of art becomes the postulate, like cosmopolitanism today, for which, revealingly, there is no single, intelligible definition of the term.

The master artificer simply knows what will happen; for instance, if the car mechanic gets a whim to tinker with an electric motor or if mathematicians or physicists justify their work with explanations based on private mythology. The master artificer is characterized, on the other hand, by legitimization through procedure while at the same time accepting violations of the procedure as an extension of the previously usual process – as far as they are successful. In Heinrich von Kleist’s (1777–1811) The Prince of Homburg (Der Prinz von Homburg, 1822), which was written around the same time as Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit, the aristocratic convention of sheer positivity initially seems to be victorious, before, finally, bourgeois morality – as an end that justifies the means – is praised from the depths of a woman’s heart.

The master artificer exposes such escapades as a form of intellectual kitsch in which ideologues indulge (Napoleon dismissed intellectuals – that is, Hegelian conceptual workers – as ideologues because they did not bend to his will for power).

The master artificer Weibel is oriented in equal measure around technical ability and the replacement of the theologically based concept of creation by means of organized work. Where is there still room for the new, for the development or progress beyond fate and necessity? The master artificer Weibel knows, not only from his own experience, that one cannot step into the same river twice. At least every thirty years – that is, with every new generation – there is a new take on the old Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and the old Rembrandt (1606–69), on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), on Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94) and Henri Bergson (1859–1941). The work of these gentlemen has not changed one iota in its material composition, and yet, from time to time, it seems completely new. However, every master artificer knows that, logically, the newest new as something completely unknown is only operative in that it changes our view of the old; that it only gains in importance through its power to change the way we view traditions. This is in line with the media theory of Marshall McLuhan (1911–80), proposed in the 1960s, which states it is only the latest new media that enable us to appreciate the supposedly passé earlier media.

The invention of photography did not make painting obsolete, but it did change our awareness of the specific capability of painting. The invention of film – even of the “talking pictures” – forced us to reevaluate the aesthetic of the still image of photography. Our understanding of electromagnetism increases our respect for the pre-Socratic claim that “The whole world is full of gods,” and computer-generated artificial intelligence will clarify the old question of how the physically existing brain can produce ideas (specifically, metaphysics) that can, in turn, determine how the form and hence the achievement of the materially existing world change.

The master artificer Peter Weibel also agrees with other master artificers on how this vast feedback of ideas on physics can be understood as a source of theoretical objects. For the sphere of artistic work, this results in the field of theoretical art. Therein, the master artificer assembles everything that has previously been grasped as a medium in its own autonomous, ontological determination with regard to form and shape; that is, as the nutrient fluid of “autopoiesis,” so to speak. However, the theoretical objects are also characterized by “allopoiesis”; that is, the creation of reciprocal connections of meaning that are alien to each other. In the art world, “allopoiesis” has been defined at least since Marcel Duchamp’s (1887–1968) lecture “The Creative Act” in Houston, 1957. Duchamp was aiming for the participation of the recipients, the observers, the viewers, and the listeners in the creation of works. “Allo,” the Greek word for “other,” refers to these other participants.

Theoretical art thus defines these efficacies called “work” that are not owed to the creative artist’s central will, but rather result from participation, assistance, cooperation, helping, partaking, and involvement, and are, for that reason, constantly changing. The word “theory” conceals within it the ancient Greek understanding of theater viewers as “theoreticians,” and indeed they had to play that role for only their perception and its intellectual processing produced a meaningful coherence of the events onstage. We are all necessarily theoreticians when we grasp in thought a material, physically existing occasion for perception, whether on a stage or on a gallery wall. It is precisely in this context that the phenomenon of metaphysics plays a decisive role, which has constituted an integral part of Peter Weibel’s work ever since the early 1960s.

In our times, after the experiences of the past and their enduring impact, we should not fall prey again to the myth of unequivocal truths and ideologies promising the cure of all woes. Therefore, since existentially we are thrown back on ourselves and our own, individual interpretation of things, the conception and the understanding of what individuality is attains key significance: it is the prerequisite for the authority of statements by artists and scientists whose arguments are based on thought constructs and findings they have developed themselves, and which are not – as in the past – the result of the decisions of a collective or of invoking some higher power. Without constantly engaging intellectually with the reflecting, acting individuals in the outside world, their statements would be devoid of all validity and their claim of the authority of their authorship would be forfeit.

Metaphysics is in the tradition of conveying this understanding. In its core it addresses the relation between the res extensa, as René Descartes (1596–1650) expressed it during the Thirty Years’ War, that is, the real, physical world, and the res cogitans, our world of ideas.[1] Metaphysics explores the question of how the immaterial sphere (Greek meta) impacts the material sphere (Greek physis). Both in his artistic and theoretical work Peter Weibel draws on these fundamental considerations, the essential features of which were already tabled by the Pre-Socratics in ca. 500 BCE. If we think back about our life, we notice that our life and our experiences have been affected to a far greater extent by thoughts than by physis. Thought processes actually provide our orientation in day-to-day life and are necessary in order to determine the boundaries of what is possible in the context of the general, externally given conditions, so that we can experience our limitations in view of the feedback between the two spheres.

Starting from this, Peter Weibel developed the concept of the medium, and confirmed the Ancient World’s tenet that the world is full of gods – in the sense that through the proof of the physical existence of ubiquitous, electromagnetic waves, the terms “god” and “artwork” are filled with a new reality that they did not possess before. Weibel configures the space of the invisible and enables us to experience it as verifiably and comprehensibly visible in its role as a medium in his works, frequently with the aid of technological devices – metaphysics par excellence, a translation process of thought into reality. Facilitated by media, in this way the intellectual efforts of single individuals can be linked and assembled into a new collective experience, which everyone – without possessing artistic talent or prior knowledge – can understand and have. The metaphysics of Peter Weibel thus opens doors that did not exist before to a new collective, which unlike in previous centuries is not dependent on banks, churches, or rulers, for instance, but is based on the intellectual engagement and intellectual achievements of individuals. Thus, one could say that, ironically, it is through media art that the old theological justification for the idea of God has been helped to acquire new relevance on the basis of scientific findings pertaining to research on electromagnetic waves.

What links us to our fellow human beings is our ability to engage with things that we do not understand, day in, day out, to have confidence in the world and assert ourselves in it. Even though at times we feel somewhat helpless, fearful, and with no firm ground under our feet when confronted by virtual phenomena and increasingly opaque conditions. Whereas in the past we experienced art in terms of “that painting, hanging on the wall, is a masterpiece and we, as irresponsible minors, must accept this without any further thought,” with Weibel, we as the viewers, are given a completely different function: works by the metaphysician Weibel represent for us opportunities for perception, which make considerable demands on our intellectual capabilities because we have to process the statements and methods ourselves. The works challenge us to draw our own insights from them and to define the concept of art ourselves. If we are willing to engage with the works, they offer us the opportunity to become aware of our own cognitive ability, receive confirmation of our individuality, and confidently insist upon it; to realize that the power of our thinking matters; to understand that how what we cannot understand about the world can be utilized in a way that generates communication with others, who like us are confronted with the same uncertainties, anxieties, and doubts. It is negative states such as these as well as the ability to control emotions and endure them that are the decisive qualities of individuals, artists, and scientists, in their role of models instead of shining examples. In the ability not to give way to despair, not to give up, and instead to develop strength, a metaphysical feedback of the physis with its own world of ideas, yes, to develop stability as an attitude: in this sense everyone is an artist.

Peter Weibel is the last and first metaphysician whose works seek to serve as the occasion for us to think about and engage with our inner and external worlds, with the connections between different spheres. He is able to process and realize the invisible for us, to generate practically a “real virtual reality” so to speak, in which the virtual, the mental, and the conceptual take on form, and which we can comprehend as viewers and “partners” of the metaphysician, as “theoreticians” – without any prior knowledge. Through Weibel’s interdisciplinary work and through confronting the blind spots and imperfections of our cognitive ability, we are enabled to recognize false as false and for a moment be amused by the initially successful deception, by the realization of our own capacity for error. For this demonstration and for imparting these insights we owe an immense debt of gratitude to the metaphysician, the medium Peter Weibel.

Weibel’s importance for the establishment of the status of a work as a fake, both in everyday subjects and those pertaining to art, science, politics, and economics, is evidenced by very many of his early actions, interventions, and demonstrations. These are designed as exemplary forms of work on the problems of the verum falsum, the true and the false. As Karl Popper (1902–94) recognized nearly a century ago, work is only serious work if it tackles what is a priori considered as the falsification (not the verification) of imaginative, speculative hypotheses, which are furthermore characterized by the desire to be recognized and assert themselves.[2] As an example of Weibel’s artistic practice in this theoretical field, I would like to mention his Attacks (Anschläge) of 1970–75. When Weibel, for instance, holds up the sign “LÜGT” (LIES) under a police station’s sign in the manner of how a referee would do during a sporting event, this is not a work of art in the traditional sense, but it reveals the artist as a medium of connection between two units of meaning: “police” and “lies.” By momentarily attaching signs to police stations – or other public institutions as in different actions of this kind – Weibel is committed to finding the truth by detecting the false.

In connection, however, with what the signs can actually accomplish and achieve in politics, the economy, or society, they can be seen as theoretical objects that sometimes, as in the case of protest signs by Joseph Beuys (1921–86) – such as the one stating “Dürer, ich führe persönlich Baader + Meinhof durch die Dokumenta V” (Dürer, I will personally guide Baader + Meinhof through Documenta V) of 1972 – end up in collections of theoretical art. These Weibelian actions with their suggested demonstration objects are early criticisms of the misunderstandings over the alleged relation between the sign and denotation, or between the signified and signifier that have been rampant since Ferdinand de Saussure[3] (1857–1913). Signifier and signified can only be distinguished in the unity of the sign. Sign operations, whether as design or constellating order, must therefore be evaluated according to how clearly they are able to differentiate between our intrapsychic operations of perception, of imagination, of classification, of reflecting on our environment, and the outside world. To put it differently: according to how strongly sign operations are capable of bringing the aesthetic difference between consciousness and language/communication, the differences of appearances and characters, or of contents and forms into play. The peculiar status of the demonstration material, which is usually referred to as “model,” “teaching material,” or “toy” in simulative or experimental processes, becomes evident here. The material, arranged in a constellation formation, becomes the signifier of the “difference,” the indicator of the aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological difference. These differences between the intra and extrapsychic world are dictated to us innately, with which phenomena such as optical illusions, ambivalence, ambiguity, as well as the diversity of interpretation such as in the case of confusion of ideas and misunderstandings are also predetermined. They force us, for instance, to ask the question of what is true before eating wild mushrooms, even if we are tempted to do so, for people with experience in this field tell us that, despite an outward similarity between a champignon and a death cap mushroom, only one of the two is edible. We therefore have to be prepared for the epistemological difference between character and appearance at all times. In the mimicry of various creatures, their ability to adjust to different environments, sometimes to such an extent that they become unrecognizable, nature forces us to recognize the ethical difference: the possibility of a deliberately wrong, “lying” allocation of consciousness and language. We have all experienced how thoughts or ideas change as soon as we try to offer them to the perception of others by linguistic concretion. In addition, writers and artists such as Kleist or Picasso have shown us that thoughts and ideas can only gradually form themselves during the process of concretizing them as language, through speaking or scribbling; that thoughts change in the process of their formulation, or metamorphose into completely new thoughts which we only hit upon after several unsatisfactory attempts at formulation. Nor can we ever state explicitly what we feel we know so precisely (not even the texts of laws can be written in a sufficiently unequivocally explicit manner for all those working within the judicature to understand and interpret the law in precisely the same way). Furthermore, our assumed “understanding” is always transformed by other people’s “strange” reactions to the very same texts.

There always remains a gap of inadequacy, of ambiguity, of polyvalence, between what we hope to impart to others by putting our ideas into language, and the manner in which these others actually seem to understand us. It is this aesthetic difference that is essential for any communication which refers to ourselves or to others, auto- and allocommunication, to which we innately, on a neurophysiological, biochemical, genetic, and sociobiological level, owe our ability to learn and to adjust.

Weibel repeatedly manifests explicitly these differences (Greek chorismos, English gap), like when he engraved the word “gemeinsam” (together) on a block of stone, similar to the engraving on a gravestone, in the Viennese gallery Galerie nächst St. Stephan in 1975, but then broke the block in the middle, so that the word “together” was broken in two to visualize the concept of “disunion”: the disunion between visual perception and cognitive conception, and thus between language and consciousness.

It is a characteristic feature of Weibel’s figures of thought that they not only attempt to open up the idea of perceptual concepts to the public within the field of art, but that Weibel also tries to offer the analyses of this fact. Thus showing that the perception of ourselves and of others has always been prestructured by categories which have developed in line with the evolution of the machine responsible for our worldview (brain), and according to which our mind/consciousness is often bewitched by the linguistic output, and we lose ourselves in hopeless paradoxes, tautologies, and literal naiveties.

Since the beginning of the 1960s, formulations of aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological differences have proved to be the most sustainable which use the Latin inter as a prefix, as in intermedia, intertextuality, interpretation, intercultural, and of course also interest. Inter marks the opening up of relations from differences, for instance, in the form of spacing (such as between figure and ground), as indifference zones (such as in Marcel Duchamp’s objects), or as “no-man’s-lands” (like the internet as a public space). A good example for such relations resulting from differences that kept occurring in Weibel’s work during the 1960s and 1970s was the Tele-Action The Invisible Boders (Die unsichtbaren Grenzen, 1970). In this action, Weibel focuses on the pattern of the boundary present within traffic zones at airports, marks of difference such as the transit area, the duty-free zone, extraterritorial zones, the border police area, passport control, the area marked “Wait here” intended to protect people’s privacy, etc. Weibel shows that invisible boundaries also have tangible consequences, and refers to our daily bewilderment in face of the fact that the merely virtual characteristics of what is legal and illegal, what is native and what is alien, what is “we” and what is “they,” what is mine and what is yours, by no means remain virtual, but develop a claim to reality, or a power to disturb our intentions that we usually only grant to walls and electric fences.

These irritations occur in daily life because we hardly ever take into account the good old structuralist principle according to which commonality between different parties is produced by their insistence on this difference, and their differences are based on common codes, and organizational or existential forms, for instance, as cultures. Cultures that are proud of their singularity, of their unmistakable characteristics, have in common this claim to their respective singularity. Opposing armies have the no military police who let their own media amusement become part of torture images. The separation of the image level “torture” through the magic eye of one’s own little image machines from the real experience of destruction of all sense of self as an act of psychophysical torture produced a “silent scream,” which was apparently heard all the more loudly because it could not be recorded, but only imagined as an experience of self-awareness. The Magic Eye awakens the echoes of these silent screams, this “eloquent silence,” in the viewers themselves; it becomes the eye of the media monster Polyphem (the specter of multi = polymedia), confronted with whom we can only confess to being a “nobody.”

In a major exhibition titled Inszenierte Kunstgeschichte (Staged art history) at MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (1988), in another action Weibel presented a “great painter who has, however, received hardly any attention so far, because the overpoweringly great and new always receives little attention at first.” With institutional and curatorial authority, Weibel compelled the public to follow his guidelines. After he succeeded in directing attention to this new painter, Weibel confessed, without any scorn or mockery, that the work presented was his own, but it was not exhibited in recognition of himself as a great painter; rather, he wanted to draw attention to the institutional, curatorial, and publication methods that the audience traditionally trusts.

Weibel destroys this trust, not as a bad-boy prank, though, but in order to raise a new, much more important question for all interested parties, namely: Why should the exhibited paintings suddenly no longer have any significance as great paintings just because a nonpainter, without further ado, simulated it? How can the knowledge of a deliberate forgery change the significance of a thing if it has not changed in between its presentation and the discovery of the simulation? I refer to this attitude towards the artistic sphere – which I share – as “always fishing for complications.”

Working on questions like these with the audience – that is, the theoreticians – thus creates a work of theoretical art. In that sense, such forgeries are among the most important works of theoretical art today; they are not recognized by “experts” as forgeries, but, on the contrary, acknowledged as originals, and were only presented to us as fakes because the forgers revealed themselves as their makers. Forgers marketed their Georges Braques (1882–1963), Pablo Picassos (1881–1973), Henri Matisses (1869–1954), René Magrittes (1898–1967), or Salvador Dalís (1904–89) so brilliantly that no expert could detect the forgeries; these artifacts were openly labeled as “fake” because they were in fact ingenious paintings in the spirit of Braque, Picasso, and so on.

For decades, so-called appropriation artists around Elaine Sturtevant (1924–2014) have worked on such issues as painters. Until their arrival, an original painting seemed to possess an aura of uniqueness because its pictorial qualities could not be rendered by any reproduction technique. The appropriationists stripped or dispossessed these unique paintings of their aura, thereby raising a number of fundamental questions: Why is a work regarded as a forgery if it cannot be recognized as one even by experts, and was only exposed either by accident, or by the forgers themselves? Should not those forgeries that were declared masterpieces receive the highest recognition, and fetch the highest prices? What does it mean that, for istance, our prevailing perception of Greek art has to be recognized objectively as a forgery? (The fact that sculptures and architecture were originally colored even in the classic age of the fifth and fourth centuries can no longer be denied; however, due to our understanding of the classics to date, we still perceive this fact as “wrong.”)

Unfortunately, this movement has so far had no influence on the market-driven terminological teeter-tottering and phrasemongering in the traditional art business. Theoretical physicists and theoretical mathematicians have, admittedly, gotten much further with this. The experimenting practitioners have granted them to assess whether the conclusions drawn from experiments are sensible or tenable at all, or if they are purely evidence-based, terminological sorcery that, at best, stimulates criticism of the contradiction between what one knows and what one sees as cognitive dissonance. In that respect, it is certainly understandable and acceptable that the master artificer Weibel is interested in mathematics as well as in physics and electronics, in genetics as well as in research on artificial intelligence. In those fields, nothing is considered great simply because it claims the label “scientific:” a large number of the scandals around fraud and cheating in science today were – and are – launched by the scientists themselves. Equally, in the field of the arts, something can no more assert a claim to validity simply because it bears the propagandistic label “art.”

For a long time, artists have been orienting the form of their works towards initiating communicative processes. The material work as an abandoned appliance for the production of distinctions in the constellating order as shaping of material, preserves the possibility of updating the rites and liturgies at any time. The predominance of the art forms performance, action teaching, happening, agitation, and actionist demonstration proves the ritualization of artists’ work, which commenced at the latest with Dada and the Surrealists’ soirées. In this context, the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk in the Bayreuth vein was brought back to life, which consolidated all media and all forms of perception with the aim of endowing the most comprehensive liturgy of all historical times, together with the institution initiated by the artist himself. The practice of faith became the practice of art. Artists who had been molded by a strict Catholic upbringing knew how to present art as the civil religion of society that the latter had been searching for – also in the field of culture – since the age of Enlightenment and the process of secularization.

Weibel, for one, is certainly not planning to stop at the mere conversion of churchly activated sacraments into those that are commonly administered by museums, for instance, on the occasion of exhibition openings, or by scientific institutions when they award honorary doctorates. Poetae docti and their useful findings in the fields of technology, architecture, medicine, the military, and historiography, have been known in great quantities since the Renaissance. They all pride themselves on at least denouncing, if not defeating, pro bonum contra malum, the wrong and the evil, the warlike, the addictive, and are rewarded for it. Pro verum contra falsum, they exercise the criticism of ideology as an ideology; hunt down the fascist, racist, anti-Semite in everyone else, and are committed to the truth, and allegedly not to other interests; they are only keen on basic research, not on profane advantages. Faced with all this self-elevation of representatives of the truth, it is high time to prove the value of criticizing truth, especially criticizing truth that is fundamentalist in origin and enforced by totalitarian means. Not to shy away from the truth – that is easy for its agents. However, to criticize it, and not give in to it even when it appears in the shape of an evolutionary law, as a finding of geneticists, brain scientists, or sociobiologists, when its origins lie in consensus, and when it can be demonstrated with undeniable evidence – that is Weibel’s role, that is the role of all of us.

He demonstrates that he is at the top of his game by managing to portray “science” and “art,” the alleged seals of quality, as similarly meaningless or deceptive as many shoppers in supermarkets perceive the labels “organic” or “regional” to be. In this way he promotes clarification as the liberation from naive credulity.

The master artificer Weibel – as a proponent of theoretical art – works at his preeminent institution ZKM towards the goal of, on the one hand, guiding product liability out of the realm of goods, and establishing it in the realms of culture and those of art and science, on the other. For this highly commendable effort, he deserves prizes and awards of the kind that consumer protection and product testing now enjoy. Artists’ tinkering with labels, galleries and museums committing prospectus fraud, and the ambition of curators promoted as service to the public, should no longer be tolerated. Thinkers at your service, master artificers at work – with Weibel first in line.

Note: This text is a composite of several texts and orations by Bazon Brock between 2006 and 2020, including “Ex opere operato: The Working Activist and Friend of Analysis Relies on Ingenuity Instead of Creation, on Falsification Instead of Proof of Truth, on Invention as Discovery Instead of Presumptuous Artistic Creation,” in Peter Weibel and Harald Falckenberg, eds., Peter Weibel: Das offene Werk 1964–1979, exh. cat. Neue Galerie Graz, Universalmuseum Joanneum (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006), 953–60, and “Peter Weibel, der Werkmeister,” in Peter Weibel: (Post-)Europe? Lovis-Corinth-Preis 2020, exh. cat. Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie, Regensburg, ed. Agnes Tieze (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2020), 102–4. The latter catalog accompanied the exhibition Peter Weibel: (Post-)Europe? Lovis-Corinth-Prize 2020, which was on view at Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg from October 3, 2020 to January 31, 2021. Translated from the German by Steven Lindberg, Y’plus, and Gloria Custance.

[1]
See René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, trans. R. P. Miller (Dordrecht:Springer Netherlands, 1982). First published as Principia philosophiae (Amsterdam: L. Elzevir, 1644).

[2]
See Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery: On the Epistemology of Modern Natural Science (Berlin: Springer, 1959). First published as Logik der Forschung: Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft (Vienna: Springer, 1934).

[3]
See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, subsequent eds. Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). First published
as Cours de linguistique générale (Lausanne: Payot, 1916).

[4]
Zwischenraumgespenster is also the title of a publication about Lüpertz’s series of 10 lithographies of the same name, see Markus Lüpertz, Zwischenraumgespenster (Berlin: Galerie Springer, 1986).