Art as Night: An Art-Theological Treatise

Art as Night proposes a type of a-historical dark knowledge (a-theology and theology, at once) crossing painting since Velazquez, but reaching back to the Renaissance, especially Titian and Caravaggio. As a form of formalism, this night is also closely allied with forms of intellection that come to reside in art as pure visual agency or material knowledge while invoking moral agency, a function of art more or less bracketed in modern art for ethical and/or political agency.Not a theory of meta-painting, Art as Night restores coordinates arguably lost in painting since the separation of natural and moral philosophy in the Baroque era. It is with Velazquez that we see a turning point, an emphasis on the specific resources of painting as a form of speculative intellect, while it is with contemporary works by Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer that we see the return of the same after the collapse of modernism, and after subsequent postmodern maneuvers to make art discursive yet without the austerities of the formal means present in Art as Art. Art as Night argues for a non-discursive form of intellection fully embodied in the work of art - and, foremost, painting.A synoptic and intentionally elusive and allusive survey of painting, through the collapse of the art market in late 2007, Art as Night suggests by way of this critique of an elective night crossing painting that the art world is an endlessly deferred version of pleroma (Hegel’s Absolute Knowledge), a fully synthetic world given to an exploration and appropriation of the given through classical mimesis and epistemology and its complete incorporation and transfiguration in a theory of knowledge and art as pure speculative agency. In effect, Art as Night is an incarnational theory of art as absolute knowledge.