Page 73 - Fernando Sinaga. Ideas K

choose between one mode or another but have to grasp both at once and
in one fell swoop. At this point the law so akin to Theodor W. Adorno (in his fondness for forms that are hermetic and difficult at first sight) seems to be fulfilled in his work, that is, the deeper the gaze penetrates the matter and the more resistant the work is to interpretation, the greater the benefit obtained and the less opposition the work puts up to being interpreted. For this to happen there is no need to extract the opacity or the pleasing hardness of art, which even when enveloped in mystery does not renounce its sensuality.
The reductionism I have pointed out stems from a modern awareness that is not derived from any profane theology or sort of religion even if it contains traces of metaphysics (Beuys once more); thrusting its roots into the materi- alism of physical matter, art escapes religion. However, the spiritual sense of art is clearly a feature of aesthetic modernism, that is, the feeling that the aesthetic can only be fully realised and embodied where there is something more than the merely aesthetic. That this “something more” than the purely aesthetic should be embodied by absence as a trigger of the modern form, or by the cancellation of narration, is one of the antinomies of modernity; the vacuum, zero or blank space typical of the modern aesthetic are only tropes that give shape to this sense of absence. But even the tension between the transcendental and the immanent allows for a third possibil-
ity that springs from the form of thought itself: dialectics. Sinaga resorts time and time again to dissolution as a metaphor of the disappearance
and transfiguration of matter, and does not need to chant that “all that is solid melts into air” or speak of “making the ethereal solid without passing through the liquid state”5 in order to confirm the constant movement of matter (including stillness or motionlessness as a form of movement). Disso- lution is a metaphor, but it is also a chemical process that is not necessarily equivalent to the meaning of “synthesis” in Hegelianism: everything flows and is subject to change, there is no rest in motionlessness and there is stillness in speed. But this dialectic no longer functions according to the formerly caricaturised triad that not even Hegel took seriously and which leads to synthesis as the negation of negation; rather, in its best version,
it conceives history as an eternal game of unresolved contradictions liable to be negated over and over again, indefinitely. There is no synthesis or dissolution (nor is there in an ultimate form that emerges from the choice of minimalism and reductionism, and metaphysical transcendence, or between sculpture and writing, between literature and philosophy); rather, there tends to be a negative dialectic that does not seek a meeting of opposites but prefers to leave contradictions in all their crudity, in a type of thought that led Walter Benjamin to state (concerning the reading of Adorno’s “Metacri-
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5. Fernando Sinaga, “Solve et Coagula”, op. cit., p. 62.