At the end of the first part, Plato and Aristotle were already sitting at my imaginary table. Plato had given me some reason to distrust the image and its supposed relationship with reality. Aristotle had opened things up again somewhat: imitation need not be mere copying. Art can select, condense and transform, and in doing so make something visible that would not have been visible in the mere reproduction of reality. This had brought me a little closer to my own work. Only one crucial question remained unanswered: why must an artistic idea take precisely this form and no other? Why this shadow, this composition, this body, this material? And why do some decisions seem necessary to me, while others may look beautiful but ultimately remain decorative? By this point, Kant has to join us at the table.
With Immanuel Kant, predictably, things do not become any easier. In his Critique of Judgment of 1790, he considers, among other things, what actually happens when we judge something to be beautiful. For him, beauty is not simply an objective property of an object. An aesthetic judgment is based on a feeling of pleasure or displeasure, yet it nevertheless makes a peculiar claim: when I call something beautiful, I am not merely saying that I personally like it. I speak as though others ought to be capable of recognising this beauty as well.
Kant distinguishes the beautiful from what is merely agreeable and from what is useful. If I like a particular wine, someone else is perfectly entitled to say that they find it undrinkable. We behave differently when making a judgment of beauty. We expect at least a certain degree of agreement, even though we cannot prove our judgment by means of a concept or a mathematical formula. Kant speaks here of “disinterested pleasure”: I do not have to possess, use or desire an object in order to find it beautiful.
For my question, this initially solves less than one might expect. Beauty and art are obviously not the same thing. A face can be beautiful. A landscape can be beautiful. Light can create a wonderful structure on a wall without anyone having turned it into a work of art. Conversely, art can disturb, repel or deliberately be ugly. Nor do I feel any need to regard ugliness automatically as intellectually more sophisticated. That would merely be the same mistake in reverse.
Kant becomes more interesting to me elsewhere. In his theory of fine art, genius enters the picture. Art does not simply arise by following already established rules. Genius produces something for which the rules cannot be fully specified in advance. This certainly does not mean that craftsmanship is unimportant. Quite the opposite: without skill, a magnificent idea may remain exactly that – a magnificent idea. But technical mastery alone does not produce art.
This touches on something that matters to me in photography. I can learn lighting. Rembrandt lighting can be explained, split lighting can be constructed. I can determine how large a light source should be, what effect its distance has, and how a face changes when I light the short rather than the broad side. All of this is craft, and good craftsmanship should by no means be underestimated. But if I follow instructions and produce a technically perfect Rembrandt portrait, I have not thereby created a work of art. I have, for the moment, demonstrated that I know how to produce Rembrandt lighting. Perhaps something can already be taken from this: art needs form and skill, but skill alone is not enough. Beauty is not enough either. Both can be part of a work of art without being what makes it art.
This brings us to another idea that initially feels much closer to me: art as expression. The idea has many variants and a long history. Leo Tolstoy formulated it particularly radically at the end of the nineteenth century. For him, art essentially consists in a person expressing a feeling they have experienced in such a way that other people become, as it were, infected by that feeling. Art thus becomes a form of human communication. Later, R. G. Collingwood emphasised that, through the artistic process, the artist first clarifies an initially undefined feeling and gives it conscious form.
At first, this sounds remarkably familiar. Many of my series do not begin with the thought: I would like to make a beautiful picture today. They often begin with something that occupies me. A story, a contradiction, an observation, sometimes an irritation. Only then does the search for images, light, bodies, symbols and writing begin. With Judith, the material already existed, but I was not interested in illustrating a biblical story. With Convivium, the Seven Deadly Sins were the starting point, not the destination. The finished image should do something with that starting point.
And yet the expression theory also makes me suspicious. If art were primarily the expression of what the artist feels, the work would quickly become an illustrated version of its creator’s inner life. Besides, expression alone is far from being art. A fit of rage is expression. A love letter can be expression. My occasional relationship with Photoshop can become remarkably expressive. It does not follow that Adobe owes me a place in a museum. More importantly, a pure expression theory would place the viewer in a peculiar role. They would have to reconstruct as precisely as possible what I felt. That does not interest me. When someone stands in front of one of my images, I do not want to prescribe what they should feel. Nor do I want a work to be considered “properly understood” only when the viewer reproduces exactly the thoughts I had while making it. Perhaps art does not simply express something. Perhaps it transforms something.
This brings us back to form. And here formalism becomes interesting. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Clive Bell argued that what matters in art is “significant form”: particular relationships between lines, colours and forms that evoke a special aesthetic emotion. The content of a work, the story it tells or its subject matter consequently recede far into the background. What becomes decisive is the organisation of the visible.
For a photographer, this is initially seductive. Of course form is crucial. Moving something by a few centimetres can destroy a composition. Light is not simply illumination; it structures space. A shadow can divide a body, continue a line or make an area disappear from the image. Black and white alters relationships that would function completely differently in colour. Form is not packaging into which meaning is subsequently inserted.
But here, too, I cannot quite follow all the way. In my work, it is not irrelevant what stands in front of the camera. A body is not simply another geometric form. A word is not a line. A historical script is not merely an interesting texture. A particular photographic process carries its own history with it. When I use Latin, a different field of meaning emerges than if the same sentence appeared in German in a modern sans-serif typeface. When I allow part of a body to disappear into shadow, I am not interested only in the resulting distribution of shapes. The shadow can mean concealment, protection, threat, boundary or loss.
And this is precisely where I encounter a distinction that has occupied me since my visit to Palazzo Cesi: what is the difference between style and artistic language? Style can be recognisable. Perhaps that is even its most obvious characteristic. Certain lighting choices, contrasts, scripts, image formats and motifs recur, and eventually someone says: that looks like one of your pictures. For an artist, that is flattering at first. Presumably for the art market as well. Recognisability sells extremely well.
But it can become a trap. If I use shadows only because my pictures are supposed to look dark, the shadow is no longer language. It is decoration. If I use Latin because Latin reliably makes an artwork look significant, it becomes a gimmick. If I imitate historical photographic processes because their flaws and irregularities look attractive, I am producing an effect. Perhaps artistic language begins where these formal decisions are no longer interchangeable, where I can at least answer for myself: why exactly this way?
At this point I would already be dangerously close to a definition. But two gentlemen are still sitting at the table who would probably explain that I have so far overlooked a crucial part of the problem. In the 1960s, Arthur Danto posed an uncomfortable question. What distinguishes a work of art from an ordinary object that looks virtually identical to it? Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes became central to his thinking. In supermarkets there were cartons for Brillo cleaning pads. In the gallery stood objects that looked almost indistinguishable from those cartons. If one is packaging and the other art, the difference obviously cannot lie solely in what we see.
Context suddenly acquires enormous weight. A work of art stands within a history of art, theories, intentions and interpretations. We do not recognise something as art solely on the basis of its visible properties. We also need to know the context in which it stands. George Dickie went a step further with his institutional theory. Put very briefly, something also becomes a candidate for art by being presented and treated as such within the practices and institutions of the artworld. Artists, museums, galleries, curators, critics and audiences are therefore not merely an apparatus surrounding art. They form part of the conditions under which something can be understood as art at all.
I understand this argument. And I admit that it makes me uncomfortable. It gives the artworld a power that I do not particularly like. If an object becomes art because the right people in the right room treat it as art, the doorman suddenly seems more important than whatever lies behind the door. Danto is not quite that simple, however, and Dickie also deserves more than this caricature. Both are responding to a genuine problem. Ever since Duchamp presented a urinal as Fountain, art can obviously no longer be defined by a particular method of craftsmanship or by a visible property. An object can appear completely ordinary and nevertheless, within an art-historical context, pose a question it would not have posed in a plumbing-supply shop.
So I cannot simply throw context out of my definition because I dislike the consequences. But neither do I want to give it the final word. Institutional theory can explain why something is recognised as art. It does not yet answer the question that brought me to this table in the first place: what do I demand of my own art?
And with that, something has shifted during this dialogue. I began with the question: what is art? By now I am almost less interested in that question than in another one: under what conditions am I myself prepared to regard one of my images as art? Plato reminded me not to trust an image merely because it looks like reality. Aristotle showed me that transformation and condensation can make knowledge possible. Kant separated beauty from art and made clear to me that craftsmanship may be necessary without being sufficient. The expression theories brought the artist and inner experience into the discussion while also revealing the danger of reducing art to the communication of personal feelings. Formalism forces me to take visible form seriously. Finally, Danto and Dickie prevent me from pretending that a work of art comes into existence entirely independently of history, context and the artworld.
None of them gives me the definition I am looking for. That is probably a good thing. Perhaps my original question was wrongly formulated. Perhaps I do not need a definition that decides what art is everywhere and for everyone. I first need to discover what must happen for me to understand one of my works as art.
By now I have a few answers, or at least a few criteria for exclusion. It is not enough for an image to be beautiful. Nor is it enough for it to be technically excellent. A strong idea alone is equally insufficient; a magnificent idea can result in a miserable picture. Expression is not enough, form is not enough, and the fact that a museum hangs the work on its wall would not be a sufficient answer for me either. For the museum, perhaps. Not for me. Things may become interesting when these elements do not occur separately but enter into a relationship with one another.
My works often begin with something that occupies me: a thought, an experience, a contradiction, a story, sometimes merely a feeling that is difficult to name. This something demands a form. Then the actual work begins. Light, shadow, body, writing, material, photographic process and composition are not chosen because they are beautiful in themselves, but because they do something with that starting point.
One criterion seems increasingly important to me: necessity. Not in the sense of objective necessity. Of course Judith could have been photographed differently. Another artist would have created completely different images. But within my own work, I should be able to account for why a decision was made. Why that shadow lies there, why that pose, why that word, why that script, why that process. “Because it looks good” is not a forbidden answer. It is simply not enough for me.
And yet the finished work must not be completely exhausted by these explanations. If I can explain everything an image means in a paragraph and the viewer is then merely expected to check whether they have correctly decoded all the symbols, I have not created art but a picture puzzle with an answer sheet.
This is where the viewer returns to the table. I can control the conditions of an image. I can decide what I show and what I conceal. I can offer meanings, establish relationships and leave traces. But the moment the work encounters another person, something enters that no longer belongs to me: that person’s experience. A shadow I intended as protection may mean threat to someone else. A body may evoke vulnerability, desire, age, strength or transience. A word carries a history, but that history encounters another history within the viewer.
That does not mean that every interpretation is equally plausible. The work sets boundaries. It provides something. But within those boundaries a space emerges that I cannot completely control. And perhaps I need precisely that space.
This brings me to a first attempt: For me, art is the deliberate condensation of a thought, an experience, a feeling or a contradiction into a sensuously perceptible form. The decisions that shape this form are not arbitrary but carry meaning. Yet the work is not exhausted by the intention of its creator; it opens a space in which the viewer can establish their own relationships and meanings.
That comes much closer to what I understand my work to be. But Galileo is still sitting at the table. So this definition, too, must withstand an objection. What about a work that comes into being without a prior thought? What about an image whose meaning I recognise only after it has been created? What about chance? Intuition? A photographic moment in which I initially know only that something is right, long before I can explain why? As a photographer, I know such moments well.
Perhaps even “deliberate condensation” is already too narrow. Sometimes the work knows something before I do. Then I would have to formulate it more cautiously: For me, art arises where something experienced, thought, felt or discovered finds a sensuously perceptible form whose Gestaltung carries meaning without completely determining that meaning.
I can live with that for the moment. Perhaps a definition should not do much more. It should not issue me a certificate stating that my images are art. It should give me a question that I can take with me when I stand in front of one of my own pictures: Why do you exist in precisely this form?
If my only answer is: because it looks good, then it may well be a good picture. Sometimes that is entirely enough for me. But when form, thought, experience and meaning are so intertwined that I cannot simply remove one of them without losing something essential, then I am approaching what I am looking for in my art.
I doubt Plato would be satisfied with that. Kant would probably still have a few comments. Danto would presumably ask where the picture is hanging. And Galileo? I would like to let him remain at the table a little longer. Perhaps a useful idea is not one that no longer allows contradictions, but one that we are willing to expose to the next good objection.
My definition of art is therefore provisional.
I hope it remains so.