Slovo a Smysl (Dec 2015)
A World of ‘Purely Artistic Conception’ and a ‘Universal Art of the Spirit’: Max Dvořák and Karel Teige between Phenomenology and Surrealism // A World of ‘Purely Artistic Conception’ and a ‘Universal Art of the Spirit’: Max Dvořák and Karel Teige between Phenomenology and Surrealism
Abstract
In the early 1940s, Karel Teige, a prominent theorist of the Czech avant-garde, returns to Max Dvořák’s concept of history of art as ‘history of the spirit’. Starting in the late 1930s, Teige pursued a sustained inquiry into the essence of the so-called imaginative (or ‘phantasizing’, in Teige’s own terminology) art, and his findings, which he intended to synthetize in a broadly conceived Phenomenology of Art (left unfinished), led him to the view that the essence of imaginative art consists in the visualization of ‘spiritual forms’ of an inner model. Primarily, it consists in a substantial transformation of one’s relationship to the external world: specifically, an internalization of senseperception and its metamorphosis into spiritual forms of subjective perception and consciousness. This is where Teige might have been influenced precisely by Dvořák’s abolition of any antithesis between naturalism and idealism, internal and external image, and his quest for a unity of Kunstwissenschaft and artistic practice. Teige was aware that this problem is central and constitutive for the entire era of Modernity and of the avant-garde, just as Dvořák was aware that the history and theory of modern art cannot consist in a mere mechanic continuation of the traditional arthistorical method; rather, it must reflect upon the creative processes of modern art.
