As I mentioned some five posts back, I’m well overdue in commenting on James Elkins’ talk at the University of Western Ontario in late January. His lecture ‘On Empathy and Related Concepts in Art Theory’ discussed an interesting working attempt of his to tackle a resurgence in theories of beauty and the imagination, and did so with such dizzying breadth that I cannot hope to reproduce all of his provisional thoughts here, even with the aid of my copious (albeit sloppy) notes. Especially at such a temporal remove from the lecture itself.

There is, however, good reason to discuss Elkins’ questions, even so belatedly as this, if only to address some broader issues of criticism that have been floating at the horizons of this blog for some time. In looking at a number of past approaches to art, such as the ‘Inwardness’ of German Romanticism or the attempt to project an artist’s seeming intention onto the work, Elkins was ready and willing to point out the limitations of those methods - what ultimately amounts to their lack of intellectual rigour and the dubious end-points that come of attempting to discuss art via the nebulous optic of emotion.

Deconstruction is certainly all the rage compared to the outdated modes of Romantic criticism, but even Gordan Hatt’s remarks of Marla Hlady’s Playing Piano - a sculptural sound installation built from the precise dissection of a piano - retain a distinctly sentimental edge:

“Taking a thing apart is a critique — a way of honouring the thing, a way of admiring its construction and the many decisions of its designers and makers. It exposes the assumptions and aspirations upon which the thing is made and it reveals the author’s inventions and limitations. Rebuilding the thing is a form of love and respect. Adding to a thing — decorating it, manipulating it, customizing it — is to enter into a dialogue, to talk to the thing and to engage its maker’s spirit, to speculate on its history, to revel in its possibility and to indulge in creative anarchy.”

If that critical taking-apart of things was ever meant to carry a notion of distance, it is certainly vanished in Hatt’s version of the experience, which evokes an image of the student of dissection who kisses the frog while parsing its innards to pieces, still in expectation of transforming the corpse into a prince. This constant return to empathetic engagement implicates a heart that cannot be excised from the viewing of art; yet for all that, it remains a heart that must be subjected to scrutiny.

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