5

Art, Materiality, and the Meaning of Being: Heidegger on

the Work of Art and the Significance of Things
Philip Tonner1

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Introduction: Ereignis
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In the ‘Addendum’ to ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Heidegger tells us that
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art belongs to ‘appropriation’.2 It is apt that in the years leading up to the
publication of this revised version of his essay in 1960, he should note this
deep connection. It is this term – Ereignis – that Heidegger began to use for
his central concern, the finite disclosure of Being qua meaningful presence
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in conjunction with the opening up of Dasein qua finitude, in just the period
when he composed ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’.3 Ereignis is Heidegger’s
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term for ‘disclosure as such’ and this term names the occurrence of Being ‘in
its truth’; Ereignis signals our being appropriated into our openness, it is that
movement of our being opened up by virtue of our essential finitude in such
a way as to creatively receive and conserve a meaningful world of things.
Ereignis, and so art, is indelibly historical: the event of appropriation is the
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event of the coming to be of historical worlds.4

It is because of this essential connection to Ereignis that the question of art
is a question of ‘origins’. Great art for Heidegger is a world-opening event and
true art history is world history: a great art work, on Heidegger’s account, is
an event that enshrines the meaning of Being (the way that things can become
meaningfully present) that constitutes a historical community. The question
of art for Heidegger is essentially related to the question of truth. Specifically,
art is a paradigmatic case of the kind of historically emerging truth that
Heidegger is concerned with in texts of the 1930s, such as Contributions to
Philosophy (GA 65)5 and Introduction to Metaphysics.6 In fact, Heidegger’s
account of art is bound up with his idea of the ‘history of Being’, which is also
a history of truth.7

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 122 Heidegger and the Work of Art History

That is why he chose to investigate the question of art in terms of its origin.
However, what kind ‘of ‘origin’ is in question here, conceptual or actual?
Heidegger returns to Greece when considering the origin of the work of art and
the origin of the history of Being. In his later writings Heidegger suggests that
there have been successive worlds that have unfolded over the epochs of what
he calls the ‘history of Being’. Each epoch is constituted by a different world in
Heidegger’s sense and the succession of different worlds is accounted for by
the fact that the earth continues to resist our collective attempts to subdue it
and to incorporate it wholesale into a particular historical world.8
Yet there was art thousands of years before Greece. We may wonder if
pausing to consider such art might cast a different shadow over the question
of the origin of the work of art, if not of the exact nature of the ‘origin’ in

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question for Heidegger, especially when we consider that Heidegger denied
that there was a ‘prehistory’ of art in the first version of his ‘Origin’ essay.9

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What I would like to do in this chapter is to first enact such a pause by asking
what Heidegger might have had to say about Franco-Cantabrian cave art?10
Interestingly, that other thinker of art’s ‘origin’ in the twentieth century, George
Bataille, considered such prehistoric painting to be art’s actual origin.11 By
contrasting his view to that of Heidegger, we will be able to see that Heidegger
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offers a quite different account of the origin of the ‘work of art’ than Bataille.
Yet both accounts border on one another and my discussion here will bring
out aspects of Heidegger’s account that might otherwise remain concealed.
From here I will return to Heidegger’s account of art on its own terms
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and I will discuss the question of the work of art in terms of his ontology
of the ready-to-hand and present-at-hand. Here I will raise the question of
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materiality and so relate Heidegger’s account of art to his later discussion of

‘things’. There is, says Heidegger, ‘something stony in a work of architecture
… coloured in a painting … [and] spoken in a linguistic work’. This is the
work’s ‘thingly’ element and, so holds Heidegger, it compels us to say that ‘the
architectural work is in stone … the painting in colour … [and] the linguistic
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work in speech’. Yet, Heidegger asks, ‘what is this self-evident thingly element
in the work of art?’12
I will suggest that in his writings and lectures from the late 1940s until
his death, Heidegger takes advantage of the space opened up by his
discussion of art to explore the notion of the ‘thing’ in terms that go beyond
his early categories of readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand. Heidegger’s
philosophy of art can make a contribution to our understanding of the
materiality of things, including paintings, sculpture, and architectural objects,
all of which can sit side by side in the modern museum. From here I will
return to the question of the relationship of art history to world history. I will
intimate how art works and things materially enshrine the ‘meaning of Being’
constitutive of a particular culture and I will suggest why this is important
from an art-historical perspective.

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 Art, Materiality, and the Meaning of Being 123

Prelude: The History of Being

On Heidegger’s account, the history of Being is not to be thought of just as

the history of human conceptions of ‘Being’, or as the history of philosophy
qua metaphysics, or as a sequence of past events, or as the history of the West;
although, in one way or another, all of these notions are related to, and made
possible by, this idea. The limit of thinking of the history of Being only in
terms of one or more of these ideas is that it might lead one to think of history
(Historie) as a collection of more or less related past events, where the notion
of the ‘past’ is paramount, that are subsequently available to historiographical
study in the present. In contradistinction to this and in terms of the notion
of ‘historical reflection’ (introduced by Heidegger in Basic Questions of

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Philosophy)13 we should think of the history (Geschichte) of Being as an event
(Geschehen) that constitutes a destiny (Geschick).14

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Historical reflection on meaning or sense (Be-sinnung) is tasked with
understanding a historical ‘happening’ (Geschehen) that still involves human
agents because it has taken them over or taken them up in it and which only
gets an overall ‘point’ from the direction of its historical unfolding.15 As
such, history is not primarily concerned with what is ‘past’: rather, history
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is concerned with the future as a ‘coming towards’ where the meaning
of any historical event – and of history itself – is created by what comes to
pass through it. It is on the basis of this account that Heidegger will say that
genuine history is composed by ‘the goals of creative activity, their rank
and their extent’.16 This is the subject matter of historical reflection and such
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reflection attempts to get at the meaning of the events of history. Art works,
on this account, gain their significance – or their ‘Being’ – in terms of their
function of casting or throwing (forward) towards the ‘preservers’ of the work
the very way in which things can become meaningful and understood for
that group or civilization. That is, works of art are ‘projections’ where ‘the
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concepts of an historical people’s nature, i.e., of its belonging to world history,

are formed for that folk, before it’.17
In ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Heidegger notes only three historical
(Western) worlds, the Greek, the medieval, and the modern. Elsewhere, he
recognizes a Roman world and an ‘early’ form of the modern world that
has not quite reached modernity’s consumerist maximum.18 Art’s historico-
political role is that particular works (especially non-representational works
such as the Greek temple and Gothic cathedral) gather together the different
inchoate narrative possibilities that are possible for a particular historical
people that remain embedded in their background practices. The work of
art will appropriate by composing these inchoate narrative possibilities into
world-opening works.19 Thus, works of art illuminate the style of a particular
cultural-historical world.20

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 124 Heidegger and the Work of Art History

Works of art focus and direct the lives of individuals while putting up for
decision the highest values of a group, what is to count as holy and what unholy.
That is, for Heidegger, a great work of art is a ‘cultural paradigm’ and the
function of such paradigms is to inaugurate the history of a community. Great
works do this by defining and determining how the beings that agents can
meet in their experience can show up as meaningful: the world opened by the
work is the horizon of beings. Great art, for Heidegger, includes all manner of
world-defining events, such as the building of a temple or cathedral and, as I
will suggest below, the painting of a cave. It is in this sense that on Heidegger’s
account art is essentially an origin and works of art reveal and open what
ordinarily remains out of site; and that is the world.21

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Prehistoric Art: Heidegger and Bataille

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For both Bataille and Heidegger, the question of art is directly related to the
question of origins: for Heidegger, art is the essence and origin of all particular
works of art while for Bataille, the question of art’s origin is essentially related
to the question of the origin of our species. Both Bataille and Heidegger were
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pursuing their writings on art at the same time: Bataille had been writing
on prehistory and prehistoric art since the early 1930s and Heidegger had
been working on the text of his ‘Origin’ essay since 1935.22 To be sure, art
for Heidegger does not produce our species in a biological sense but it does
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account for the origin of artists, audiences, and entire historical worlds. On
Heidegger’s account, the creation of a work of art is an event that opens up a
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historical world for a historical people.

For Heidegger, artists are not motivated by ‘fame’ and they are not affected
by ‘disregard’. Their works remain withdrawn from both ‘public’ and ‘private’
consumption: that is, their works are not objects that can be held up for
subjects (in a distinctly modern sense) as an object of aesthetic appreciation.
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Works of art do not ‘belong to man’.23 Rather, works form the ‘site of decision
of the rare ones’, poets who articulate the truth of the Dasein (Being-t/here-
now) of the people and thinkers who elucidate the way in which things can
become meaningful for a people, as this was opened up by the poet.24 The
work of art belongs to what Heidegger designated a ‘going under’ that alone
can become ‘foundational history’, the kind of history that leaves in its wake
a clearing of Being: this is the moment of the opening up of a historical world
and this description of it is tremendously suggestive in terms of an account of
cave art where artists would actually go under the ground or into a mountain
to bring forth their works. These works were probably visited again, possibly
by a select few, only on rare and exceptional occasions.25
Artworks, for Heidegger, are self-subsistent. They lack a relation to beings
in their familiar organization. Yet the self-subsistence of the work marks it

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 Art, Materiality, and the Meaning of Being 125

out as something created; self-subsistence relates the work to its creator but
at the same time marks that creator’s Dasein as ‘sacrifice’. Here, of course, we
encounter a theme central to Bataille’s account of art – namely, sacrifice. But
sacrifice, on Heidegger’s account, is not a literal sacrifice, nor is it an event of
cultural mourning or revering. But, for Bataille, who was also interested in
the question of the holy and the unholy, the sacred and the profane, and with
the way in which the world is meaningfully there for human beings, unlike
Heidegger, the origin of art is bound up with transgression, with horror,
with the erotic and, ultimately, with actual death. For Heidegger, by contrast,
the sacrifice central to the creation of art is thought of as an agent’s reticent
dwelling in awaiting that which is given over to a group as the meaning of
Being constitutive of their ‘age’.26

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The kind of sacrifice that interests Heidegger is sacrifice unto the abyss of
Being: in other words, sacrifice unto das Ereignis; sacrifice unto the epochal

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play of disclosure and concealment. In such sacrifice the artist a historical
agent (amongst and amidst other agents) awaits what is given over to them
in their historical dwelling as the truth of Being.27 Great art is world-historic.28
Heidegger says, ‘it is only work that within the mutual calling forth of the
sway of the earth and the sway of the world puts to decision the sway of gods
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and the ownmost of man’ (italics in the original).29
Insofar as a work of art ‘works’ in Heidegger’s sense of the term it ‘holds
open the open region of the world’.30 Just because of this, the work of art can
preserve the space of questioning wherein that which was once inchoate
in the background practices of the people is now seen to be intrinsically
mysterious and worthy of question and is so put up for decision in terms of
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how things are going to matter for those who dwell in the world opened up
by the work. Artworks put up for decision the highest values (the gods) of a
group while asking after what will prove essential for human dwelling in that
world. Because of this a true art history for Heidegger is also world history
since a reading of such works ought to reveal dimensions of historical worlds
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that have been opened up and appropriated by agents. The promise of such
a world-historic reading of a work of art is that it might reveal the way in
which things are and/or were meaningful for a historical people insofar as
that meaningfulness was composed or materialized in the work: a historically
reflective reading of the work will elicit its meaning as world opening event.
When the work of art is taken as a cultural paradigm (in the sense of opening
a cultural world) it allows just about anything whatsoever to count as art just so
long as the work in question qua paradigm ‘holds open the open region of
the world’.
By contrast, for Bataille, art’s origin is essentially related to the question of
the actual origin of our species. His view is that the birth of art in the Upper
Palaeolithic caves of Europe ‘followed upon the physical completion of the
human being’.31 Guerlac suggests a reading of Bataille’s 1955 work on Lascaux

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 126 Heidegger and the Work of Art History

as a ‘parodic myth of origins’ where the ‘miracle of Greece’ is substituted for

‘the miracle of Lascaux’; the classical world is substituted by the primitive
world and the world of reason is replaced by the world of the sacred; and if
it was the case that the miracle of Greece heralded man the rational animal,
then the miracle of Lascaux, on Bataille’s account, heralds man the ‘religious
animal’.32
For Bataille, the distinction between the sacred and the profane is
absolute: it admits of no degrees, and passage from one to the other requires
a transformation. One way that this can occur is in art: art expresses religious
transgression and Bataille’s study of Lascaux presents transgression in
relation to a ‘sacred moment of figuration’.33 Now, transgression, as Foucault
suggested, is a ‘gesture concerning the limit’.34 It is a ‘flash of lightening’

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where both limit and transgression depend upon and belong to one another.
It is transgression that is the focal point of Bataille’s reading of Lascaux

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precisely because it is his view that human societies are founded upon
prohibition.35
The act of painting transgresses the ordinary round of profane life and
gestures towards the sacred realm. Bataille says, ‘A work of art, a sacrifice
contain something of an irrepressible festive exuberance that overflows the
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world of work, and clash with, if not the letter, the spirit of the prohibitions
indispensable to safeguarding this world’.36 For Bataille great art is excessive
and essentially transgressive of an existing world, whereas for Heidegger it is
not the transgressing of a world that is at stake, but its originary opening. Art,
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like sacrifice, on Bataille’s account, transgresses the world of work in festivity
and play and the moment of sacrifice ‘restores to the sacred world that which
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servile use has degraded [and] rendered profane’.37

While the art of Greece does represent a miracle for Bataille, the light
emanating from it is that of ‘broad day’. In other words, this is the light of the
creative powers of fully modern humans. The light of dawn, by contrast, that
emanates from Lascaux is, while tentative, nevertheless ‘the most dazzling
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of all’.38 At Lascaux, newly born ‘mankind’ attempted to measure ‘the extent

of its inner, its secret wealth: its power to strive after the impossible’.39 In fact,
the miracle of Lascaux inaugurates a fourfold logic of transfiguration: la bête
humaine is transfigured from animal to man and then into its proper being as
religious animal; while the paintings in the cave transfigure the animal into
a beautiful representation, they also bestow the animal so represented with
a force of prestige; the final transfiguration is that of the artists themselves
who are transformed from ‘cavemen’ animals into a being that ‘resembles
us’, and that is, into Homo ludens ‘man the player’ as opposed to Homo faber
‘working man’.40
Art constitutes nothing less than the chronological origin of Homo sapiens.
He says,

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 Art, Materiality, and the Meaning of Being 127

my subject is the most ancient art, that is to say, art’s birth, not some one of its
later aspects or refinements. [At Lascaux] Resolutely, decisively, man wrenched
himself out of the animal’s condition and into ‘manhood’: [and] that abrupt,
most important of transitions left an image of itself blazed upon the rock in
this cave.41

Chronologically, the most ancient art is art’s birth or origin. But this birth is
also the ‘moment’ of the origination of the species Homo sapiens sapiens. It is this
‘moment’ that has come down to us on the wall of Lascaux. Like Heidegger,
Bataille privileges the origin for it is there that what emerges does so in its
most vibrant form. Unlike Bataille, for Heidegger, the ‘origin’ (Ursprung) of the
artwork is, paradoxically, ‘art’. This is because, unlike Bataille, Heidegger is
not after an actual historical origin (or a causal one, where the artist would be

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the causal origin of their works) of art. While the ‘greatest’ art by Heidegger’s
estimation occurred in eighth- to fourth-century Greece, this is nevertheless

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not the historical origin of art.42 Ultimately, Heidegger’s question is about the
logical/conceptual origin of art where the origin in question will account for
the nature of what issues from its source.43
For Bataille, the very birth of art, and the afterlife of that birth, remains
‘blazed’ upon the cave walls at Lascaux. Humanity, as something we recognize
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because it resembles us, originates with the birth of art: Homo sapiens is Homo
ludens; ‘we’ are differentiated from the animal and from the no-longer-animal-
but-not-yet-man Homo faber or Neanderthal man by our ability, not to make
(more complex) tools, but by our ability to play and to create ‘useless’ things
like works of art that transfigure the world by virtue of their beauty.44 This
uselessness of art will be put in question for Heidegger since works of art do
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have a job to do on his account. Yet, as we will see, they are neither ready-
to-hand nor present-at-hand. The uselessness of art in fact will be thought
of in terms of the works’ materiality and resistance to total control and
consumption by human beings. Just as for Heidegger, a great work of art, like
the Temple of Poseidon at Paestum,45 is the materialization of the meaning of
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being of an age, so too for Bataille, Lascaux is the materialization of the epoch
that produced it.46
Heidegger does not devote attention to such art in the way that Bataille
does (for him, art can ‘only be or not be as historical’ precisely because when
a ‘peoples’ art begins so too does their history). As such, the very notion of
‘prehistoric art’ is a non-starter for him, but what can we say about it from
his broad perspective?47 On Heidegger’s terms we should say that the image
on the cave wall represents the originary opening up of a historical world
for the creators and preservers of these works. In its original sitting in the
cave, the ‘work’ of the work of art is occurring: it is opening up the world of
the prehistoric peoples that created it. Art works in their original sitting first
give ‘to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves’.48 This is a
phenomenological claim, not a historical one, and the ‘prehistoric’ peoples

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 128 Heidegger and the Work of Art History

that created these works of art were just as ‘historical’ in Heidegger’s sense as
the artists of later times. Insofar as a work ‘holds open the open region of the
world’, it counts as a work of art qua cultural paradigm and on this account
pre-Greek Upper Palaeolithic artworks count as cultural paradigms whether
they fit into Heidegger’s preferred Greek paradigm or not. Specific artworks
can open up a ‘Greek world’ or a ‘medieval world’, and so on a Heideggerian
account, cave art such as that represented at Lascaux or Nieux opened up a
‘hunter-gatherer world’. While we can no doubt mount an argument to the
effect that cave art opened up a world of shamans who would send their souls
to a world of spirits or a world of sorcerers who would attempt to affect a
successful hunt nevertheless, on Heidegger’s terms, the ‘work’ of the work of
art qua opening up a world is occurring.49

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For Bataille, transgression is the organizing power in human life and it is
by virtue of its dynamism that the dual birth of art and humanity occurs. For

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Heidegger, the organizing or ‘enabling power’ that issues Dasein is the event
of appropriation to which art and human agents belong. For Bataille, it is
prohibition that opens up a historical world; for Heidegger it is the work of
art itself that does this. For Bataille and Heidegger great art is an origin that
involves sacrifice but for Bataille this sacrifice is conceived of as a making
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amends.50 For Heidegger, it is sacrifice unto the abyss of Ereignis opened in
us by our finitude. The abyss that Bataille recognizes is ‘opened in us by
eroticism and death’.51
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Heidegger and Works of Art

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Art is fundamentally historical and Heidegger’s account of it is holistic, all the

aspects identified by him are equally basic. For Heidegger, the broad general
social practice of ‘art’ is the origin of individual works of art, of the artists who
create them and of the audiences who preserve the works so created. We can
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hope to understand art, on his terms, only if we understand this broad social
practice. What art does that distinguishes it from other social practices – its
central ‘work’ – is that art ‘is truth setting itself to work’.52
Art is a particular form of disclosure (aletheia), and by way of the disclosure
characteristic of art what Heidegger called the ‘meaning of Being’ in Being and
Time can be determined.53 Yet the category of art is an uncomfortable fit for the
categories that relate to objects as these are elaborated in Being and Time. A work
of art is neither ready-to-hand nor present-at-hand but it shares features that
are common to both of these categories.54 Ready-to-hand objects (or beings)
are items that are available to an agent in terms of that agent’s understanding
and interest. Such items can be put to work by an agent in terms of their
projects and tasks. Ready-to-hand items are useful tools and such items are
structurally intelligible to agents because of their intrinsic reference to their

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 Art, Materiality, and the Meaning of Being 129

use by such agents. In Being and Time, the category of equipment is a paradigm
case of the available.
Items that occur without such a ‘worldly’ relationship to pragmatic use
are not ready-to-hand: by contrast, they are present-at-hand.55 Such things
are objects that have not been appropriated into a worldly context in terms
of their relationship to an agent’s understanding, interest, and pragmatic
use. Such entities are beings taken as occurrent; they are discrete objects that
bear certain properties, such as colour, weight, height, and so on, and these
properties are those that objects possess independently of any reference to a
human being’s use for them.56
What kind of thing then is a work of art? Works of art, such as van Gogh’s
Pair of Shoes or Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross, display a distinctive ‘thingly’

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quality. There is ‘something stony in a work of architecture … coloured in a
painting [and] spoken in a linguistic work’.57 But a work of art has no specific

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purpose, like a hammer or a steering wheel does. In such cases the specific
materiality of the useful object is intrinsic to, and is fully consumed by, its
use (the hardness of steel necessary for a good hammer; the tactile nature of
the steering wheel necessary for a good grip: such ‘properties’ of the tool are
subordinate to its use). Yet works of art are produced by human beings, just
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like tools are produced. And they are fashioned out of the material world
that we encounter all around us, whether that world is subordinated to a
particular task or not.
So, works of art contain, like a present-at-hand pebble on the road, and
a ready-to-hand piece of equipment, like the hammer, a distinctive ‘thingly’
material component. It is this ‘thingly’ element that compels us to say that
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‘the architectural work is in stone’ and so on.58 But the nature of this ‘thingly’
dimension of the work is by no means transparent. Perhaps, then, it is
unsurprising that Heidegger should begin his questioning of art in his ‘Origin’
essay by asking ‘what is this self-evident thingly element in the work of art?’59
Heidegger begins to explore this question in terms of the definitions of
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objects that have come to light in the Western tradition of philosophy and he
finds that none of the three traditional definitions of ‘thingness’ (as a ‘bearer of
traits’, as the ‘unity of a manifold of sensations’, and as ‘formed matter’) will
do. This is because in each case the thing is defined in terms of its relationship
to lived experience or to its possible relationship with a subject.60 Insofar as art
is thought as aesthetics (aisthēsis, Ästhetik), as an essentially human-centred
leisure activity where consumable ‘lived-experience’ (Erlebnis) is what counts,
the work of art will be transformed into an object that exists solely for our
subjective apprehension and consumption.
In an important sense such works have ceased to ‘work’ in the sense
that Heidegger is interested in. Such works of art are ‘bygone’. Due to their
objectification by subjects they have passed into the realm of ‘tradition and
conservation’.61 They have entered the culture industry and are housed

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 130 Heidegger and the Work of Art History

in museums and galleries and private collections. A great work of art is a

bringing forth; it is an event that opens up a historical world for a historical
people. Historical worlds ebb and flow and when they end, like the Greek and
the medieval worlds, their great art works are no longer alive because they are
no longer ‘opening up’ their worlds in the originary way that they once did.
Whereas in their ‘original sitting’, they first gave ‘to things their look and to
men their outlook on themselves’, when they die they pass into tradition.62 That
is, they become museum pieces (although, see Heidegger’s Sojourns where he
hints that such ‘museal art’ might preserve an afterglow that gestures towards
the works’ original ‘shining of truth’). Further, on Heidegger’s account the
moment of objectification that turns a work of art into an object fit for our
‘appreciation and enjoyment’ is that ‘element in which art dies’.63 It is in this

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context that the modern concept of the museum as mausoleum is plausible (as
Adorno suggested and as Heidegger would seem to agree).64 Museums and

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galleries are the storehouse of works of art that exist solely for our subjective
apprehension and consumption. Rather than existing as an object of ‘aesthetic
connoisseurship’ in a museum or gallery, or as made available in a ‘science’ by
the art historian, on Heidegger’s account the work of art belongs in the agora
as a public truth event.65
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In fact, ‘aesthetics’, like ‘metaphysics’, is something that Heidegger argues
must be overcome. The art that is capable of doing so is an art that thematizes
the ‘other’ of beings (Being/world) rather than attempting to represent it by,
for example, turning it into a metaphysical super entity or by transforming
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it into something known.66 Such art allows the ‘enigma’ (that there is Being)
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to presence ‘as the enigma’.67 It does not attempt to grasp in representational

thinking that which cannot be grasped by it: such art will not attempt to
transfigure what is unknown and unknowable into something graspable by a
subject in representational or metaphysical thought.68
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Things Again

Despite the failure of the traditional definitions of thinghood, the definition of

the thing as formed matter intrigues Heidegger. This is because it recalls the
‘thingly’ character of the ready-to-hand insofar as such items are produced
by human agents. He reminds us that the Greeks, who had no concept
corresponding to the modern notion of ‘fine art’, understood the different
ways in which truth disclosure occurs generally as ‘bringing forth’. In such
terms they included art and craft under the name technē.69 Heidegger is not
concerned with ‘fine art’: he is concerned with ‘great art’, the kind of art that
can open the ‘truth of beings as a whole’, and such art corresponds to a Greek
paradigm on his account. It is because great art opens for ‘man’ the ‘truth of

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 Art, Materiality, and the Meaning of Being 131

beings as a whole’ that it is an ‘absolute need’.70 Overcoming aesthetics will

enable a return to that more Greek sense of art as technē.71
Despite his interest in things as compounds of matter and form, an
understanding of the work of art in these terms does not do justice to what
Heidegger designates the ‘work-character’ of the work. Works of art belong,
as works, ‘uniquely within the realm that is opened up’ by them and it is
there that ‘the work-being of the work occurs essentially’.72 Just as Heidegger
discovered the equipmental character of equipment (the Being of the ready-
to-hand, its usefulness) by bringing the reader before van Gogh’s painting of
a pair of shoes, so the work character of the work of art reveals itself in the
‘speaking’ of the painting. Here, in our nearness to the work, we are transported
from our everyday engagement with the world into the happening of truth.

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The thematization inherent in van Gogh’s Pair of Shoes, for example,
discloses the pair of shoes in their use for their owner, in their reliability

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and sturdiness, in their worn-in durability and material resistance to bodily
movement. Heidegger will say of this work that ‘Van Gogh’s painting is the
disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth’.73 By
displacing us into the place of the event of truth, the ‘work’ of the work of
art is happening: it is an event where truth itself discloses the being of the
fC
shoes and opens up or brings forth the world of their use by their owner, who
Heidegger takes to be a peasant woman.74 Heidegger says,

From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toil-some tread of
the worker stares forth … In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its
quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow
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desolation of the wintry field … This equipment [the shoes] belongs to the earth,
and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman.75

The notion of world in play here invokes the sense of a context of

significance: it is that open space wherein the owner of these shoes goes about
their daily business. When we look at the shoes in this painting, we see them
Pr

as work shoes of some kind. They are hobnail boots and Heidegger’s view
is that they belong to a peasant woman presumably because they look like
ones he’s seen such women wearing. In their worn-in state, these shoes ‘refer
to’ or ‘point at’ other aspects of the woman’s embodied-embedded life as her
life unfolds in her environing world: how she goes about her daily business
of sowing plants, how she is aware of the subtle changes in the weather, and
how such changes will impact upon her life.76 In sum, the world of the peasant
woman is disclosed to us (we preservers of the work) as a hermeneutic totality
as we read the painting: such bringing forth reveals the basic character of the
beings that this peasant woman meets as she dwells in her world.
Works of art are self-subsistent and the process of their creation is destructive
of the artist. In great art, the artist is inconsequential when compared to their
work. The artwork is not a symbolic object nor is it an ‘installation’ that gives

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 132 Heidegger and the Work of Art History

order to beings. Rather, it is the ‘clearing of be-ing as such’. Works of art do

not ‘belong to man’ as objects of subjective appreciation. Instead, Heidegger
suggests, art itself takes on the character of Da-sein, of being ‘the there’, the
site for the revelation of meaningful presence.77 As such, the work of art is
the site of decision for the ‘rare ones’, thinkers and poets capable of a ‘poetic
thinking’ that does not represent but that lets beings be. The work of art is
‘the gathering of purest solitude unto the ab-ground of be-ing’.78 On such an
account, art is no longer concerned with any striving concerned with ‘culture’.
Ab-ground names das Ereignis; the groundless abyssal play of revealing
and concealing that opens up historical worlds, and a historical world is an
all-governing open and relational expanse.79

y
The Work, the World, and Its History

op
So, a great work of art is a ‘cultural paradigm’ and such paradigms inaugurate
the history of a community. Heidegger deliberately widens the concept of
great art to include all manner of world-defining events such as the building
of a temple, the convening of rally, or the holding of the Olympic Games.80 In
C
all of these cases, works of art reveal the world.
The world is the basis on which the beings/entities that we meet in our
experience can be involved with one another and with us and it is our
acquaintance with the world in this sense that makes it possible for us to be
f
engaged with (act on, think about, and even experience) the entities that we
encounter as the kind of entities that they are. The ‘work’ of the work of art is
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to open up or disclose a world in order to disclose things in their emergence

as what and how they are.
Being, the basic general structure of what there is in the world, is only
ever revealed to agents who are engaged within a particular socio-historical
context and the truth in art is evident when art displays what Heidegger
Pr

calls the strife (Riss) between world and earth. This strife is Heidegger’s way
of expressing the tension between disclosure and concealment as essential
aspects of the work of art. While van Gogh’s painting reveals the world of
the peasant woman, it also reveals that world in terms of its emergence from
earth. The earth is that out of which the peasant’s world is fashioned, but not
in terms that would relegate it to passive matter. Earth relates to concealment
in Heidegger’s terms and so, a little loosely, it refers to the pre-cultural ground
that resists our attempts to establish coherent worlds upon it. It is just this
resistance to total control by us that is set into the work. The work maintains
within it the historical contingency and precariousness of human worlds.
For this reason, there is strife between world and earth, unconcealment and
concealment and it is at this level that the earth qua materiality or thingly
character of the work is understood by Heidegger.

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 Art, Materiality, and the Meaning of Being 133

Insofar as an artwork continues to do its work, and so does not become

a museum piece, it ‘holds open the open region of the world’.81 As such, it
preserves the space of questioning that puts up for decision how things are
going to matter for those who dwell in the world so opened by the work.
This is the first essential dimension of the ‘work’ of the work of art. In its
second essential aspect we encounter the materiality of the work, and we do
so in terms that illuminate its thingly character. Discussion of this ‘thingly’
character of the work enables Heidegger to come to terms with the materials –
such as ‘stone, wood, metal, colour, language, tone’– that the work is brought
forth in terms of and it is here that, by contrast with the piece of equipment
where the material from which it is fashioned is entirely consumed in its
production (by being subordinated to usefulness) in an art work, materiality

y
is brought forth and made visible for the first time in excess of use, function,
and form.82 To this extent, the materiality of art – its thingly character – is in

op
excess of technological calculation and mastery that Heidegger takes to be
evident in modern technology (Gestell).83
As excess-of-use materiality cannot be explained and brought under our
control in principle and works of art, through the materials out of which
they are fashioned and through their arrangement, reveal materiality’s self-
fC
secluding nature. Materiality, so understood, is earth and all material things
possess an ‘unlimited plenitude of aspects’ that lie beyond what is intelligible
to us. Now, it is Heidegger’s view that pausing to meditate on the materiality
of even the most humble thing may prompt in us an experience of their
‘astonishing mystery’.84
Any unconcealment of a being essentially involves a rift (Riss) between the
oo

intelligibility of world and the concealment of materiality (earth). This rift or

strife is ‘the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other’ and it is just
this rift that must cast itself back into earth in the materiality of the work: ‘[t]he
rift must set itself back into the gravity of stone, the mute hardness of wood,
the dark glow of colors’.85 Withdrawal necessarily accompanies disclosure
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and the open region so opened is a space of ‘self-secluding and sheltering’.86 In

fact, it is the resistance of the earth to full disclosure that enables the particular
arrangement of the materials in the work to be set into it as figure (Gestalt),
and in all of this the materiality of the work is not fully consumed by use.
Precisely here Heidegger moves beyond the categories of Being and Time
where ‘things’ appear in terms of their use (ready-to-hand) or in terms of
occurrentness (presence-to-hand) and he will prepare the way for his later
conception of the thing as gathering the fourfold.87 As earth, materiality is
set free to be what it is and the human ‘createdness’ of the work is the aspect
where truth is set ‘in place’ as figure. Here the strife between concealment and
unconcealment composes itself and so composed, this strife/rift is the ‘fugue
of truth’s shining’.88 Truth needs materiality in order to happen at all and in its
composure truth sets materiality free to take part in its occurrence.89 Truth is

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 134 Heidegger and the Work of Art History

composed in the work in the intimacy of the work’s creation and it is for this
reason that all art is essentially poetry. Poetry is ‘projective saying’, it is the
original naming of things and from a world-historic point of view, in being
so composed, the meaning of Being constitutive of an age is ‘materialized’ in
the work.

Work and Thing

The ‘Origin’ essay is not the end of the story for materiality in Heidegger’s
thought. In a sense, it is a beginning. This is because Heidegger will build
on his account of earth/materiality as a groundless ground, that supports by

y
withdrawing (Ab-grund, abyss), in the 1940s in terms of the ‘fourfold’ (Geviert),
the ‘gathering’ of earth and sky, gods and mortals, that is constitutive of

op
‘the thing’.90
In his account of the fourfold, Heidegger focuses on the seemingly
mundane things that surround us in terms that do not subordinate them to
occurrentness or to our pragmatic tasks. The thing, thought in terms of the
fourfold, is not simply ready-to-hand. Nor is it present-at-hand. Heidegger’s
C
examples of things include benches and footbridges, jugs and ploughs, trees
and hills, deer and horses, clasps and books, pictures, crown and cross.91
In short, everything that we meet in our experience may be designated
a ‘thing’ in Heidegger’s sense. The notion of a thing intends to capture the
f
essential ‘relationality of worldly existence’.92 Things allow earth and sky,
gods and mortals to presence in their ‘simple oneness’. As a gathering, the
oo

stability of the thing as a present object is undermined. Things, while they

are culturally paradigmatic, are not everlasting and in ‘thinging’ (working)
the fourfold ‘disaggregates’ or ‘desubstantializes’ the thing: it releases it from
its ‘encapsulated self-identity’ as a discrete object and so allows it to enter a
world as a relational context of significance and involvements.93
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Things extend beyond themselves and the world that we inhabit is a world
constituted by them. Each thing is a collection of relations that reciprocally
determine a world.94 In this context the mundane things that we meet in
our everyday experience – including our everyday experience as a visitor
to a museum – preserve something mysterious. That is, things preserve the
clearing concealing event that marks the mystery of Being itself: das Ereignis.95

Earth and sky, divinities and mortals … belong together by way of the
simpleness of the united fourfold. Each of the four mirrors in its own way the
presence of the others … Mirroring in this appropriating-lightening way, each
of the four plays to each of the others … This appropriating mirror-play of the
simple onefold of earth and sky, divinities and mortals, we call the world.96

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 Art, Materiality, and the Meaning of Being 135

In ‘The Thing’, the appropriating mirror-play of the four, names the event of
appropriation, das Ereignis. Things are not ‘in’ a world: they participate in the
originary opening of worlds.

Conclusion

In today’s museums, works of art and things sit side by side and both, on
Heidegger’s account, participate in the opening of historical worlds. Works
of art and things are agents of das Ereignis. By virtue of this connection might
we be able to move beyond an understanding of the museum as mausoleum?
Might we be able to think the museum as a space, not just of difference, but

y
as a space that ‘bids the dif-ference to come[?]’97 If so, the museum would
become a space that holds open the difference between Being and beings

op
and would bid the finite disclosure of Being qua meaningful presence in
conjunction with the opening up of Dasein qua finitude. If so, the museum
would become a space of the origination of meaning in the lives of its visitors
and of the (re-)opening up of historical worlds. The museum would become a
place that brings home the difference between being and beings, a place that
fC
would enable preservation of the mystery: das Ereignis.
Heidegger’s philosophy of art is explosive: true art history is world
historical because reading a work can reveal the way in which things were
meaningful for an epoch. Further, by prompting us to consider ‘the mystery’
of das Ereignis Heidegger’s philosophy of art provokes us to tackle the question
of how these works are going to matter for us now and in the future. Art,
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materiality, and the meaning of Being unite in the culturally paradigmatic

work, be that van Gogh’s Pair of Shoes, Rembrandt’s A Man in Armour, a
carved wooden Ceremonial Turtle Post from the Torres Strait, or a painted
cave. 98 Great works of art enshrine the ‘meaning of Being’ constitutive of
an age and art history takes on a world historic dimension insofar as it can
Pr

hermeneutically reconstruct such meanings.

Notes

1 I would like to thank Helen Watkins for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I
would like to thank Philip Wallace and William Tonner for their help with this and other projects.
I’m in their debt. Earlier versions of this paper were delivered at the 36th Annual Conference
of The Association of Art Historians held at the University of Glasgow in April 2010 and at the
conference, Transgression and Its Limits, held at the University of Stirling in May 2010. I would
like to thank the organizers of both events.
2 The first version of Heidegger’s ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ lecture was delivered in November
1935 to the Society for the Study of Art in Freiburg/Breisgau. It was delivered a further two
times and was then followed by a three-part series of lectures at the Freie Deutsche Hochstift in

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 136 Heidegger and the Work of Art History

Frankfurt/Main towards the end of 1936. The ‘Origin’ essay was first published in Holzwege in 1950
and appeared with revisions and the addition of the addendum as Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes
in 1960. This version appears as volume 5 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe and is the basis for the
version in both Poetry, Language, Thought and the revised edition of Basic Writings. See Jonathan
Dronsfield, ‘The Work of Art’, in Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts, ed. Bret. W. Davis (Durham:
Acumen, 2009), 163–4, n. 1 and 2.
3 Hubert L. Dreyfus notes that in his marginalia to ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Heidegger
‘repeatedly notes’ that what is at stake in this essay is das Ereignis. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A.
Wrathall, ‘Martin Heidegger: An Introduction to His Thought, Work and Life’, in A Companion to
Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 414.
4 See Thomas Sheehan, ‘Heidegger’, in The World’s Great Philosophers, ed. Robert L. Arrington
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 112; Sheehan, ‘Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976)’, in The Shorter Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 362; Philip
Tonner, Heidegger, Metaphysics and the Univocity of Being (London: Continuum 2010), 169; Daniela
Vallega-Neu, ‘Ereignis: The Event of Appropriation’, in Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts, ed. Bret W.
Davis (Durham: Acumen, 2010), 140.

y
5 The abbreviation ‘GA’ refers to the Gesamtausgabe, the collected edition of Heidegger’s works.
6 Charles Guignon, ‘The History of Being’, in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and
Mark A. Wrathall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 403.

op
7 Tonner, Heidegger, Metaphysics and the Univocity of Being, 140.
8 Thomas E. Wartenberg, ‘Heidegger’, in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Berys Gaut and
Dominic McIver Lopes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 154.
9 Martin Heidegger, ‘On the Origin of the Work of Art: First Version’ (1935–1936), in The Heidegger
Reader, ed. Günter Figal, trans. Jerome Veith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
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10 Franco-Cantabrian cave art is one of the most notable features of Upper Palaeolithic Europe.
Modern humans arose in Africa between about 200,000–150,000 years ago. From there, Homo
sapiens sapiens dispersed through Arabia and then on to the rest of the world around 60,000
year ago. Their arrival in Europe around 40,000 years ago marks the beginning of the Upper
Palaeolithic period that came to an end at the close of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago.
11 Bataille’s Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or the Birth of Art (1955) appeared five years after Heidegger’s
f
‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ essay.
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12 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter
(New York: Harper and Row, 1971a), 19.
13 Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy. Selected “Problems” of “Logic.”, Trans. R. Rojcewicz
and A. Schuwer, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). GA volume 45.
14 Guignon, ‘The History of Being’, 393.
15 Ibid., 393.
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16 GA 45, 35.
17 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1971a), 74.
18 Ibid., 76–7. See also Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 19.
19 Guignon, ‘The History of Being’, 404.
20 Ibid., 414.
21 See Hubert L. Dreyfus, ‘Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and
Politics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993) and Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 18.
22 Bataille’s review of Luquet’s L’Art primitif appears in Documents in 1930: his writings on prehistoric
art and culture represent 30 years of scholarship. The Vézère Valley in the Dordogne is Bataille’s
stand-in for the entirety of prehistory and the jewel in the valley’s crown, the ‘pit of Lascaux’, is a
participant in the moment of the ‘birth of art’.
23 Heidegger, Mindfulness, trans. P. Emad and T. Kalary (London and New York: Continuum 2006), 28.

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 Art, Materiality, and the Meaning of Being 137

24 J. Taminiaux, ‘Philosophy of Existence I: Heidegger’, in Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century,

vol. 8, Routledge History of Philosophy, ed. R. Kearney (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 5.
25 J. Clotte, Cave Art (London: Phaidon, 2008), 22.
26 Heidegger, Mindfulness, 29.
27 Ibid., 29.
28 Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 17.
29 Heidegger, Mindfulness, 29.
30 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 1993, 170.
31 Bataille, Tears of Eros, 46.
32 Bataille, Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux; or, The Birth of Art, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (Geneva: Skira,
1955), 18; Suzanne Guerlac, ‘Bataille in Theory: Afterimages (Lascaux)’, Diacritics 26.2 (1996): 10.
33 Guerlac, ‘Bataille in Theory: Afterimages (Lascaux)’, 10–15; Nick Trakakis, ‘Bataille’ in, The

y
Continuum Companion to Continental Philosophy, ed. J. Mullarkey and B. Lord, (London: Continuum,
2009), 283–4. Trakakis, 283.
34 Michel Foucault, ‘A Preface to Transgression’, in Bataille: A Critical Reader, ed. Fred Botting and

35
Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 27.

op
Richard White, ‘Bataille on Lascaux and the Origins of Art’, Janus Head 11.1–2 (2009): 324.
Prohibition has two principle modes: prohibitions to do with sex and prohibitions to do with
death. Regarding sex, Bataille will take from his reading of Levi-Strauss that the transition
from animal to man, from nature to culture, is founded upon the prohibition of incest: here
human beings begin to regulate their lives by means of taboos. See Stuart Kendall, ‘Editor’s
Introduction: The Sediment of the Possible’, in Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric
fC
Art and Culture, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall, ed. Stuart Kendall (New York: Zone
Books, 2005),12. This ‘forbidden’ is the originating moment of humanity and of ordered society.
Regarding death, Bataille recognizes that his intermediaries between us and the animals, the
Neanderthals, were aware of death and that this is an advance on animals’ ‘indifference to the
dead’. See Georges Bataille, Tears of Eros, 32. Nevertheless, it is with modern man that a ‘new value’
is born: ‘the dead … overawed the living, who made haste to forbid that they be approached …In
raising this barrier of prohibition round what fills him with awe and fascinated terror, man enjoins
all beings and all creatures to respect it: for it is sacred.’ See Bataille, Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux;
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or, The Birth of Art, 31. The sacred is that which unifies and binds society together yet it lies at the
very limit of society; the sacred inhabits societies ‘forbidden margins’. See Nick Trakakis, ‘Bataille’,
in The Continuum Companion to Continental Philosophy, ed. John Mullarkey and Beth Lord (London:
Continuum, 2009), 283.
36 Bataille, Prehistoric Painting, 39.
37 Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Zone Books, 1989c), 55.
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38 Bataille, Prehistoric Painting, 15.

39 Ibid., 15.
40 Guerlac, ‘Bataille in Theory: Afterimages (Lascaux)’, 10.
41 Bataille, Prehistoric Painting, 7.
42 Young, , Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 15
43 Ibid., 15–16.
44 White, ‘Bataille on Lascaux and the Origins of Art’, 329.
45 Doric Temple of Hera II, the ‘Temple of Poseidon’, at Paestum (Lucania) Italy, fifth century BC. See
Sheehan, ‘Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976)’, 365.
46 Bataille, Prehistoric Painting, 27.
47 Heidegger, ‘On the Origin of the Work of Art: First Version’, 149.
48 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 1993, 168.

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 138 Heidegger and the Work of Art History

49 Bataille, for his part, accepted the interpretation of Upper Palaeolithic parietal art as sympathetic
magic: the cave paintings’ ‘work’ was to facilitate a successful hunt. See Clotte, Cave Art, 23.
On this view it was the act of painting or engraving that was paramount rather than the work
produced since that work would only be seen by a select few. The art works produced were
intended to ensure the success of the hunt, the killing of dangerous animals (the lions and bears
represented), and the plenty of game. This theory would explain the images of animals that
appear to be wounded. The human and composite creatures might be sorcerers or shamans
dressed in animal skins so as to manifest the qualities of the animal. Alternatively, they may be
representations of a god. Further, somewhat unconvincingly, the geometric signs present in the
caves might represent weapons or traps.
50 In the ‘Holiest of Holies’ of Lascaux in the ‘pit’ (or ‘shaft’ or ‘well’), there is, Bataille argues,
a representation of ritual murder and so the moment of art’s birth is bound up with the
transgression of the taboo on murder. Here represented is a fleeing rhinoceros, a dying humanoid
figure with what appears to be the head of a bird, a wounded bison and what appears to be a
staff with a bird on top. A shaman-executioner with bird mask who is imbued with ‘sacramental
character’ and who recognizes the divinity of the beast slain by him by his own death expiates the
murder of the bison. This panel depicts that primitive form of transgression, the hunt, the moment
of both the appearance of and slaying of the animal; a moment which is ‘at once inevitable and

y
reprehensible’. See Bataille, Eroticism, trans. M. Dalwood (London: Marion Books, 2006), 74.
51 Bataille, Tears of Eros, 50.

op
52 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 1993, 165. See also Wartenberg, ‘Heidegger’, 150.
53 The key terms in Heidegger’s thought – disclosure, emergence, unconcealment, truth, the
meaning of Being – all refer to the same phenomenon: the occurrence of Being within finite
human understanding. Disclosure happens at three levels (starting from the most fundamental to
the least) ‘world-disclosure’, ‘pre-predicative disclosure’, and ‘predicative disclosure’. World-
disclosure is the original opening up of a field of significance (the Da, ‘the there’, the world) for
Dasein (human existence). This opening up of a field of significance allows the beings that we
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meet in our experience to be meaningfully present to us and for them to be known by us pre-
predicatively (pre-linguistically/pre-conceptually). Here such beings may be used by us within
the various worlds of our practical engagement and concern. Combined, world-disclosure and
the pre-predicative disclosedness qua availability of beings, enables predicative disclosure:
foundational levels of disclosure enable the kind of disclosure present in our conceptual
judgements and comportment towards things and ideas. ‘Truth’ in the sense of correspondence
f
between our ideas and states of affairs operates at this level. This is the level of the traditional
correspondence theory of truth that Heidegger thinks is inadequate, and he argues that the more
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profound ‘essence of truth’ qua world-disclosure is what makes such conceptual truth possible.
See Sheehan, ‘Heidegger’, 106–11. The ancient Greek word for truth, aletheia (unconcealedness),
captures Heidegger’s sense of truth and on his account, knowing a being in its truth is to know
that being as what ‘it is’, in its being. See Wartenberg, ‘Heidegger’, 150.
54 Michael Inwood, ‘Art and the Work’, in A Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 18.
55 Dreyfus and Wrathall, ‘Martin Heidegger: An Introduction to His Thought, Work and Life’, in A
Companion to Heidegger, ed. H. L. Dreyfus and M. A. Wrathall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 3.
Pr

56 Ready-to-hand items can become present-at-hand when they become objects of (quasi) scientific
enquiry. For example, a useful tool breaks in mid activity. In this situation the agent’s normally
simple and fluid practical engagement with their useful tool that they use to accomplish their
tasks is interrupted and they encounter a difficulty and an unanticipated situation. The transition
from ready-to-hand equipment to present-at-hand occurrent object transpires when the sheer
occurrentness of the object obtrudes and the object presents itself as a discrete property bearing
entity that needs to be fixed.
57 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art, 1971a, 19.
58 See Inwood, ‘Art and the Work’, 18; see Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art, 1971a, 19.
59 Ibid., 19.
60 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art, 1993, 156; Dronsfield, ‘The Work of Art’, 130.
61 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 1971a, 41.
62 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 1993, 168.
63 Ibid., 204.

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 Art, Materiality, and the Meaning of Being 139

64 Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1967).
65 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work Art’, 1971a, 40; Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 19.
66 Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 140.
67 Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’, trans. William McNeill and Julie Davis (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1996), 35.
68 Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 140. Metaphysics qua representational thinking orders beings.
One example of this that Heidegger notes in the 1930s is the medieval doctrine of the analogy
of Being which on his account provides a formula for understanding the being of creatures in
relation to the creating and preserving Being, God. Analogical thinking does not raise the question
of being but rather formulates a religious conviction in metaphysical terms. Heidegger’s response
to this twofold problem is first that conceptual or representational thinking qua metaphysics must
be ‘stepped back’ from. Second, our experience of beings should not be set up in representational
or conceptual terms: that is, one must ‘let beings be.’
69 Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco:

y
Harper & Row, 1979), 80–82. Artisans establish a form in formless matter and the understanding
of Being accompanying this is genetically related to the productive activity of human agents. See
Tonner, Heidegger, Metaphysics and the Univocity of Being, 41.
70 Heidegger, Nietzsche, 84.
71

72
op
Dronsfield, ‘The Work of Art’, 129. Great art has, since the end of the Middle Ages at the latest,
become a ‘thing of the past’. The greatest period of Western art occurred in eighth- to fourth-
century Greece. By the time of Plato and Aristotle such art was in terminal decline. See Young,
Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 1, 6–7, 15.
Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 167.
fC
73 Ibid., 161. Italics in the original.
74 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 1971a, 44–5. In his 1987 interruption of the Heidegger-
Schapiro-subjectivism discussion, Derrida suggests that both Heidegger and Schapiro must
presuppose that the shoes in question in Heidegger’s essay are in fact ‘a pair’: for Heidegger, a
pair of peasant shoes; for Schapiro, a pair from the city. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Restitutions of the
Truth in Pointing [Pointure]’, in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 259. Being ‘a pair’ of shoes is a condition of their
oo

being available to a subject because, firstly, they invoke the subject who can stand in them and who
is ultimately the subject of the painting and, secondly, because the ‘pair-being’ of the shoes is itself
a projection of a subject for whom the painting is an object. As a result, the ‘essential uselessness’
of the painting is transformed into an object with use-value since it serves both Heidegger’s and
Schapiro’s ends, which is the appropriation of the painting at the expense of its work-being. See
Dronsfield, ‘The Work of Art’, 137. Generally, Derrida posits an axiom: ‘the desire for attribution is
a desire for appropriation.’ See Derrida, ‘Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing [Pointure]’, 260.
Pr

75 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 1993, 159–60 (my emphasis).
76 Wartenberg, ‘Heidegger’, 152.
77 Heidegger, Mindfulness, 38–9.
78 Ibid., 28.
79 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 1993, 167.
80 Dreyfus, ‘Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics’, in The
Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993); Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 18.
81 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 1993, 170.
82 Ibid., 171.
83 Dronsfield, ‘Philosophies of Art’, 219; Dronsfield, ‘The Work of Art’, 132.
84 Dronsfield, ‘The Work of Art’, 132; Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 48. Dronsfield puts it
thus with regard to the temple work: ‘the work of the temple is not just to show things in their
emergence, but to illuminate that in and on which they emerge, to set the world thus opened back

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 140 Heidegger and the Work of Art History

again on earth … It is through the ways in which the materials of an artwork are arranged that
the earth’s self-secluding nature is unfolded. It is the excess of its materiality that denies us the
possibility of ever fully mastering the work in our interpretations of it’. See Dronsfield, ‘The Work
of Art’, 132–3.
85 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 1993, 188.
86 Ibid., 189.
87 Andrew Mitchell, ‘The Fourfold’, in Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts, ed. B.W. Davis (Durham:
Acumen, 2010), 209.
88 Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 1993, 189.
89 Dronsfield, ‘The Work of Art’, 134.
90 The fourfold was named by Heidegger in 1949, the year his teaching ban was lifted, in the lecture
series ‘Insight Into That Which Is’ that he delivered at the private Club Zu Bremen. References
occur to the fourfold from the 1940s to the 1970s (Mitchell, ‘The Fourfold’, 2010, 208–18).

y
91 Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper &
Row, 1971b), 182.
92 Mitchell, ‘The Fourfold’, 208.

op
93 Ibid., 209–10.
94 Ibid., 208.
95 Vallega-Neu, ‘Ereignis: The Event of Appropriation’, 148.
96 Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, 179.
97 Heidegger, ‘Language’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper
C
& Row, 1971c), 210. (Square brackets, my addition.) Foucault suggests an interpretation of the
museum as a ‘space of difference’ where the elements and relations constitutive of a culture
are ‘suspended, neutralized, or reversed’. See Beth Lord, ‘Foucault’s Museum: Difference,
Representation, and Genealogy’, in Museum and Society 4.1 (March 2006): 1.
98 The only two remaining examples of such posts are now on display in Kelvingrove Museum and
f
Art Gallery in Glasgow, Scotland.
oo
Pr

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