Page 77 - Fernando Sinaga. Ideas K

tique of the Theory of Knowledge”) that “one had to journey through the icy wasteland of abstraction in order to definitively arrive at concrete philoso- phizing”.6 Thought can thus never encapsulate its object or abstain from fully establishing the identity of objects. But if in Sinaga dissolution and coagulation are metaphors to which he returns over and over again, no less a metaphor is the fact that both represent those very dialectical processes. The essence of the question lies between dissolving or not dissolving, or between identity and non-identity, and Adorno warns us that “confusion about identity tends to make thinking capitulate to the indissoluble. Such thinking turns the object’s indissolubility into a taboo for the subject. The subject is to resign itself, irrationalistically or scientifically, and not to touch whatever is unlike it.”7
But the opacity of thought requires us to be constantly watchful of the absent meaning: sculpture is thus the realm of philosophy or a ground fertilised by philosophising; it is, in a double gesture, an operation that is both mental and material, a “going where you don’t know”. Intensity in sculpture, its “anxiety and desire”, is the very possibility of thinking out its movement even as “inert” objects. The underlying factor here is not the accumulation of meaning by dozens of works, but this holistic category that sketches totality (and where the fragmentary and the random have a place), which is also thought as form. Once again the shadow of Adorno looms, when he insisted implacably on the need for modern works of art and thought to be arduous, and also called for attention to be given to the materiality of modern poetry and the density of language.8
Any approach to Sinaga’s work faces a methodological difficulty, and this
is also true of this very essay, as it cannot list the contents of each specific work, let alone provide a description of the works; only a sketch, as a totality, of this way of thought made into sculpture can do justice to the complex-
ity of his oeuvre. When brief biographies resort habitually to terms such as “complexity” and “cryptic” or speak of “negativity”, perhaps we should ask ourselves if these concepts are not merely non-concrete pet phrases for this aspect of Adornian dialectics.9 Appearance and essence, transcendence and immanence, plenitude and absence, order and disorder, unitary and fragmen- tary are conceptual pairs he often uses, like the dense literature generated by critics and theoreticians; some of these pairs are direct references to Hegel and now need to be re-contextualised as binary oppositions ready to be centrifuged within a negation-based dialectical system more than as mere receptacles of binary thought. Dialectics thus becomes a speculative method more characteristic of the alchemist than of the scientist, where contra-
6. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, London: Routledge, 1973, p. XIX.
7. Ibid., p. 161.
8. See T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, London/New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1997.
9. Note the absence of Adorno
from any bibliographical reference concerning the work of Sinaga, despite the long list of philosophers and thinkers who are mentioned and cited.
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