A few days ago, I was back in Acquasparta, a small Umbrian town of barely more than five thousand inhabitants, hardly the sort of place where one would expect to encounter a significant chapter in the history of European science. And yet Galileo Galilei is still present there today. A street bears his name, and at Palazzo Cesi his presence is more than a piece of local folklore. Galileo was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei and stayed in Acquasparta in April 1624 as a guest of Federico Cesi. At the time, the Palazzo was not merely an aristocratic residence. Cesi had turned it into a centre of the Lincei’s activities, a place of scientific exchange, observation and research.
I was not there this time, however, to attend a seminar on this history. I was there to lead one. It is a small but crucial difference. If you want to tell others about a place, its history and the people who lived, thought and worked there, a few facts from a guidebook will not get you very far. I therefore had to immerse myself deeply in Federico Cesi, the Lincei, Galileo and that remarkable intellectual world in which the relationship between inherited authority, personal observation and knowledge was undergoing a fundamental transformation.
At the same time, walking through Palazzo Cesi, I encountered an entirely different way of appropriating the world. There are Mannerist paintings, mythological scenes, allegories, inscriptions, coffered ceilings and a visual language that was probably far more immediately intelligible to a person of the early seventeenth century than it is to us. Art, mythology, science, religion and representation do not exist there in the neatly labelled drawers into which we like to sort them today. Looking at these rooms, I therefore began to think not only about their forms of expression, but inevitably about my own. Why do my images look the way they do? Why black and white, hard light and deep shadows? Why bodies? Why Latin and historical scripts? Why am I interested in the aesthetics of old photographic processes when modern technology offers me far more convenient possibilities? Is this already an artistic language of my own? Or does it eventually become merely a style that one repeats because one has mastered it and because it has become recognisable?
Suddenly there was a question in the room that sounds considerably simpler than it is: What, actually, is art for me? I could make things easy for myself. I take photographs, create series, work with concepts, symbols and references to art history, and describe at least some of what results as art. So presumably it must be art. The problem would be solved in remarkably little time. I simply do not believe that answer myself. What, for me, distinguishes a good photograph from a work of art? When does an aesthetic decision become an artistic statement? Does art have to say anything at all? Does there have to be an intention behind it? Is beauty necessary, useful or entirely irrelevant? Must a work express something within me, or is it enough for it to provoke something in the viewer? And ultimately, who decides whether something is art – the artist, the viewer, a museum, a curator, the art market?
Anyone who knows me knows about my enthusiasm for philosophy. There was therefore little danger that I would shrug my shoulders at these questions and simply carry on taking photographs. Quite the opposite: if a question has resisted a definitive answer for roughly two and a half thousand years, it possesses almost exactly the qualities that make it interesting to me. Nor is there any shortage of answers. Plato had one. Aristotle disagreed with him. Kant did not exactly make matters simpler. Later, attempts were made to define art through expression, form and aesthetic experience. In the twentieth century, theories finally emerged according to which art could no longer be adequately defined without its historical and institutional context. Each of these ideas explains something. None has rendered all the others obsolete.
I therefore do not want to pick from two and a half millennia of philosophy whichever definition happens to fit my photographs best. That would be convenient, but epistemologically about as honest as deciding the desired result of an experiment first and then considering only those measurements that support it. And that brought me back to Galileo. Not because Galileo left us a theory of art, but because of a method of thinking with which I had already been engaging intensively in preparation for my seminar.
In 1632 Galileo published his Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, the “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”. His situation was delicate. Since 1616 he had not been able simply to present the Copernican system as established physical truth. With the election of Maffeo Barberini as Pope Urban VIII in 1623, somewhat greater room for manoeuvre initially seemed possible. Copernicanism could be discussed as a hypothesis, provided this did not become a claim to a finally proven description of the world. Galileo chose a remarkable form for doing so. He did not write a treatise in which assertion follows assertion until the nature of the world is finally proclaimed. He allowed three men to talk to one another.
Over four days, Salviati, Sagredo and Simplicio discuss the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. Salviati largely represents Galileo’s own scientific position. Simplicio defends traditional Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology. Today his name is often read as a rather crude joke, as though Galileo had simply called his opponent “the simpleton”. It is not quite that straightforward. The name also refers to Simplicius, the important late-antique commentator on Aristotle. Even so, it is difficult to overlook the fact that Galileo does not always give his character the strongest cards. Between the two stands Sagredo, and it is precisely he whom I find particularly interesting for my question. Sagredo does not have to defend a finished doctrine. He listens, asks questions, weighs arguments against one another and changes his position when he finds the reasons convincing. In a sense, he is the ideal reader of the dialogue – and perhaps, more generally, a rather appealing model of how thinking might work.
Galileo therefore stages more than an astronomical controversy. He stages the process of thinking itself. A claim must expose itself to a counterclaim. Inherited authority meets observation, a closed worldview meets doubt, apparent certainty meets an objection that cannot simply be brushed aside. Galileo is by no means neutral in this. His sympathies are obvious, and Salviati receives considerably better arguments than Simplicio. Nevertheless, knowledge in the text emerges through friction.
As we know, the affair had consequences. Towards the end of the dialogue it is Simplicio, of all people, who also presents the argument to which Urban VIII attached particular importance: the human mind must not conclude from an observed effect that God could have produced it only in the particular way we believe ourselves to have recognised. Divine omnipotence places a fundamental limit on human knowledge. This later gave rise to the popular story that Galileo had portrayed the Pope as a fool in the figure of Simplicio and was condemned for it. Historically, it was not that simple. The conflict had a much longer history and was scientifically, theologically and politically more complex. What is certain is that in 1633 Galileo was condemned by the Roman Inquisition and forced to abjure his Copernican position.
I have no intention of making a Pope look ridiculous. And at present, the probability of being summoned before the Inquisition because of an article in Cogitationes seems manageable. But I like the method. If I want to discover what art means to me, I could of course construct a definition that fits perfectly with the images I already make. Plenty of shadow, a little Latin, historical references, symbolism, a body in the right place – and behold: my personal theory of art reliably proves that I make art. That would be a remarkably convenient outcome for the experiment.
So I want to try something else. I shall mentally seat different conceptions of art around a table. Not in order to determine at the end which philosopher was right. What interests me is what happens when I set their arguments loose on my own work. Where do they explain something I actually do? Where do they contradict me? And more importantly: where do they force me to question something I may previously have taken far too much for granted? Let us begin, then, with a man who would probably have been less than delighted to have a photographer invite him to a discussion about art: Plato.
For Plato, the whole business of images is suspect from the outset. In his philosophy, the world accessible to our senses is not the highest form of reality. Behind concrete things stand immutable Forms. Take the famous example of a bed in the Republic: first there is the Form of the bed. The craftsman makes an actual bed, orienting himself towards that Form. The painter, in turn, paints this actual bed. His work is therefore not reality itself but the representation of an object that is itself already not the true Form. Art thus ends up, somewhat simplified, at a considerable distance from truth.
For someone who works with photography, this is an extraordinarily interesting provocation. Photography has, after all, long benefited from the idea that it enjoys a particularly privileged relationship with reality. Something was there in front of the camera. Light was reflected from it and struck film or sensor. Surely, then, photography must somehow be truer than a painted image. That is, of course, nonsense. Even before I press the shutter, I have manipulated things. The word sounds harsher than the process, but that is exactly what I do. I decide what lies within the frame and what remains outside it. I determine perspective, focal length, light, shadow, timing and – particularly obviously in my staged work – posture, expression, props and space. Then comes selection. And afterwards, Photoshop. Anyone who still claims that my photography simply depicts reality probably has a remarkably optimistic understanding of photography.
Plato’s mistrust of the image is therefore not entirely alien to me. It is his conclusion that fails to convince me. Perhaps one of art’s decisive characteristics lies precisely in the fact that it does not merely repeat reality. Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, already treats mimesis differently. Imitation also plays a central role for him, but it is not merely an inferior copy. Human beings learn through imitation. Art can order and condense the particular and thereby make something more general visible. In the Poetics, poetry is therefore not judged by whether it records a specific historical event with the greatest possible accuracy. It can show what might or probably would happen under certain conditions. Therein lies a form of knowledge.
This brings me considerably closer to my own work. When I photograph Judith, I am not interested in reconstructing as accurately as possible a woman who decapitates Holofernes. With Convivium, I did not want to produce seven illustrations from which one could memorise the medieval doctrine of the Seven Deadly Sins. I take something that already exists and transform it. History, myth, symbol, body and my own present enter into a relationship with one another. Perhaps this is already a first useful thought: art does not simply depict reality. It can select, condense, shift and recombine reality so that something becomes visible that would not have been visible in a mere depiction.
But is that enough? Of course not. Otherwise we would have finished after Plato and Aristotle, and two thousand years of philosophy could have saved itself a great deal of work. Above all, one question remains unanswered that is crucial to my photography: why must this transformation look precisely like this? Why this shadow, this composition, this body, this material? Why do some formal solutions seem necessary to me while others seem merely decorative? The question has therefore changed. It is no longer merely about what art represents. It is about how it does so – and what this “how” does to us.
And by this point, Kant is waiting at the table.