Adorno’s open aesthetic methodology-today’s reconstruction of artistic technique

유현주

Today’s arts seem to open beyond the genre, their own area. We can also see there is a phenomenon that fine art and popular art crossover each other, therefore they dissolve their traditional aesthetic methodology and reconstruct it newly. Especially film is a complicated, popular and modern art in that respect. However, as a part of culture industry, film, according to Adorno, can give ‘false aura’ to people. In spite of such problem, film shows a new possibility of aesthetics through the film music, one of elements from the cinema. The most important reason is that the aural of film music has the power of “image-antidote”(or ideological- antidote) in terms of Adorno’s perspective of modern art. This thesis researches that Adorno’s perspective of modern art is based on his thought of artistic technique and technology of culture industry. He distinguishes two kinds of technology, industrial and artistic technology. Industrial technology churns out ‘standardized technologies and standardized responses’ owing to the technical rationality of societies in which total commercialization takes place. In the capitalist society, Adorno says that such a industrial technology causes ‘reification phenomenon’ and ‘fetishistic tendency’ in art. On the other hand, technology in art does play the role of chaperoning rationality at the level of controlling the material, but contrary to the technology of instrumental rationality, as can be seen in the works of Paul Klee it creates ‘a language of things(eine Sprache der Dinge)’. In other words, artistic technique can create the non-identical, the nature, the other, in capitalist society where the identical is printed mechanically. Above all, Adorno insists that artistic technique in modern art has to use a new material in artworks which breaks the illusion of reconciliation of this society. According to Adorno, montage is the very important technique which deconstruct the illusion of the united and organic world. Montage, the new technique of which Picasso and the surrealist artists are fond, is so much political in that sense. In Adorno, true modern art should repel a false illusion about a false world, so it has to inform the truth in the artwork through its use of progressive material, artistic technique, like montage. In film, Arnold Scheonberg’s music of twelve-tone technique, can be the new material which is another ‘ideological antidote’. Such music is against the auto-associationism that let us expect the image or scene, when we listen to the film music in general. Adorno suggests ‘music, image, and writing’ as an aesthetic possibility for film, further advocating an active use of the new music elements in films. As one of elements of montage in film, music is not any more background, but the supplement(la supplément). The aural of human beings has been degenerated. However, in that point, as the more primitive than the visual, the aural can awaken our lost memory in oblivion, the nature. non-identical. Finally, this thesis says that Adorno’s open aesthetic methodology is montage, here, in film as the use of a new material of music, which reconstructs today's artistic technique. Therefore, it is expected that new reconstruction of artistic technique leads us to the truth of this world.

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