Stanford Humanities Center
Santiago Zabala’s curated exhibition “The Greatest Emergency,” presented at the renowned Círculo de Bellas Artes (CBA) in Madrid this past winter, featured ten significant works of art by ten separate artists, each of whose work concerns urgent global emergencies. These works address topics ranging from addiction to pharmaceutical drugs (Beverly Fishman) to gender-based violence (Julia Galán), from rising sea levels (Timo Aho) and depictions of climate-induced forest fires (Diane Burko) to the United Nation’s Security Council’s failure to actually and effectively ensure peace (Avelino Sala). What brought these works together was not only their attentiveness to key ongoing emergencies (and their dangers), but their shared ability to actualize Zabala’s key philosophical insight: that art functions and serves as a "saving power" in relation to such emergencies.
Central to Zabala’s idea is that such a saving power not only engages and intensifies our relation to each historical emergency, such as those presented at the exhibition. Art also draws us to confront the more urgent and “greatest emergency of all: the lack of a sense of emergency” (Zabala 2019, xxi). This lack is what, in a way, becomes the more philosophically interesting emergency. For the lack of urgency about, for example, climate decline, war, famine, genocide, the ever-increasing wealth gap, or identity-based violence, says something about the quality and character of our everyday thinking—a quality of thinking that is unable to think, engage, and overcome such emergencies. It is also that quality that even forgets that we are not yet considering the question of what different qualities of thinking mean for future possibilities. This very quality of thinking shows how passive we are about thinking. In this sense, the lack of a sense of emergency points directly back to the necessity of philosophy, and also to Zabala’s task of showing how art can save us from that critique.
Upon entering “The Greatest Emergency,” I immediately understood why each artist was invited to exhibit their work. For their practice showed exactly how art lets us encounter this saving power that Zabala speaks of, insofar as art shocks the very foundations of our being. What is it about the experience of art’s "shaking of the foundations" that saves us? What does shock actually put into motion, in letting these emergencies appear, alongside the energised desire to act, on from such a break? In his book Why Only Art Can Save Us. Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (2017), Zabala shows how artistic shock is that creative force capable of dislodging us from our passive indifference. For Zabala, it was Martin Heidegger who showed exactly how art creates this sense of shock (Stroβ), for what was uncovered by Heidegger was how shock opens up history to the point where we experience its contingent and temporal edge. That is, history’s changing and changeable possibilities (Zabala 2019, 121).
The UN’s inability to actually ensure peace is well-acknowledged and well-known. It can be rationalized. News can be shared about how another UN resolution has failed. However, there is something more profound about art, and also about Avelino’s Sala’s image of five standing paint-ridden shields, which shifts the experience of what the historicity of geopolitics really means—especially for those innocent civilians who live out the consequences of not being shielded at that "authoritative" level, for those who have to emerge each day and deal with the fullest consequences of such an emergency in the long term. Zabala himself makes a remark on this precise point at the beginning of Why Only Art Can Save Us, when he talks about the distinction between information portrayed through photographic journalism as a matter of replicating the facts, and photographic art as an intensification of our being which lives out the (lack of) emergency around those facts. He puts it as follows:
A work of art, such as a song or a photograph, is not that different from other objects in the world. The difference is not one of kind but rather of degree, intensity, and depth. This is evident in our everyday encounters. Media photographs can be truthful, but rarely as powerfully as a photographic work of art. (Zabala 2017, 7)
This also speaks directly to Diane Burko’s artwork at “The Greatest Emergency.” In fact, in Zabala’s short piece “Diane Burko’s Greatest Emergency” for Art Spiel, he makes the same point in relation to the difference between Burko’s “abstract and large-scale image…layered with visual and scientific information about the urgent challenge posed to the planet” (Zabala, “Diane Burko’s Greatest Emergency”) and those photographs taken by Tad Pfeffer, who supplied Burko with photographs documenting glacier melt which she then used for her painting. Zabala states that,
Although Pfeffer’s photographs, as he explains in the catalogue Endangered: From Glaciers to Reefs, are technically more informative because they reveal ‘the precise information sought’, Burko’s paintings include something that has been lost from his scientific images. Her artwork, he continues, ‘reconnects these scientific images to their aesthetic roots, grounding them, once again, in the mystery of the image, which contains so much beyond the quantitative’. However, if the ‘mystery of the image’ contains so much more than its scientific information, it’s not due to the aesthetic roots or how it is perceived but because it grounds a different reality. (Zabala, “Diane Burko’s Greatest Emergency”)
The key, then, is to see how Zabala’s intersecting of art and philosophy is one which looks to his own understanding of Heidegger’s event of truth as a different reality—as a disclosure of a specific form of the world. This is the emergence of history as such, and so the emergence of those unforetold or repressed emergencies. This brings us back to the point that art shocks us by showing us the freedom of history, and so the freedom of choices that have led to those greatest emergencies. Art at least shows us the freedom by which we were and are tasked to respond to these emergencies. This explains why in walking through the exhibition not only was each historical emergency itself shocking, but the key shock was how such emergencies as those captured by each work are indeed "known" but are rendered in society as not all that shocking.
This brings us to a more speculative insight regarding the nature of shock—namely, that shock disrupts absolute claims to truth which otherwise suppress the emergence of new interpretations. It opens the space for a mode of thinking capable of re-engaging with emergencies from fresh, critical perspectives. For Zabala, this is precisely why shock is inherently bound to the transformative potential of deconstructive thought. In fact, this notion of shock underpins much of the post-Kantian Continental tradition he draws upon. In my own reading, this shock is particularly pronounced in the works of Nietzsche and Heidegger: in Nietzsche, through the affirmation of life’s groundlessness; and in the early Heidegger, through the existential structures of anxiety and being-towards-death as a pathway to Being’s meaning—a position which later evolved into his mature notion of letting-be.
In this history of philosophical thought, then, art has indeed come to emerge as that which lets the groundlessness of anxiety and death, as the most shocking human experiences, lead somewhere new in appearing as true concerns for our being. Anxiety and death expose things, and, in so doing, deconstruct those illusions we had built upon the emergency of not having sought truth in this more radically de-grounding way. On this point, Zabala emphasises the Latin root of the word "emergence" following his theory on the remains of Being as interpretive remnants. He states in his early work The Remains of Being (2009) that the verb "to emerge" “(which comes from Latin ‘e-’, ‘out of, from, according to’, and ‘mergere’, ‘to dip, plunge, immerse’) suggests openness, undecidedness, and multiple potentialities” (Zabala 2009, 3). Again, it is with this emergence of things and events that art responds to the lack of a sense of emergency. For experiencing art does something deconstructive in opening experience up to the potential of undecidedness from the groundlessness of history. This point is precisely why in being brought to emergence as difference, art saves us from denying danger, and throws us into a continued state of shock.
This is why artistic shock constantly reminds us that each and every experience across the world is itself manifold and unique. Shock keeps us aware of the margins, of other interpretations. It shows us that we do not really need truth in its entirety. And so, art shakes us at “an existential level” (Zabala 2017, 9). This aspect of thinking about the remainder of Being’s remnants (and so the remainders as interpretations of our everyday lives) grounds a key point concerning Zabala’s philosophy. What Zabala is here referring to as "the remains of Being" are nothing other than those historical interpretations of Being that are now just left over remnants to be used for more emancipatory ends, instead of being used as absolute choices.
In acknowledging that there is no one truth, and so that Being is only ever a remnant, Zabala claims that with art we are ready to take the necessary but beautiful risk of being altered to a new way of being: “These alterations make possible the recognition of truth’s beauty because they disclose emergencies and, moreover, because they imply change” (Zabala 2017, 23). This is why art, in fact, must resist, as shock, for when art resists, and “takes place on the margins of aesthetics” art becomes the event of truth for it establishes “a distinctive way to disclose the remains of Being,” that can then be reinterpreted for pragmatic ends (Zabala 2017, 20). Art thus becomes “a realm of salvation” (Zabala 2017, 1), lets alterations be possible, and is why “art’s alterations of reality discloses this emergency and demands a different aesthetics, one of emergency” (Zabala 2017, xii).
It is at the end of this reflection concerning Zabala’s timely reflections on the shock of art that a further question opens up in the direction of an emergence that cannot be answered here. That is, if indeed the greatest emergency is the very lack of a sense of emergency, then is it possible to question further the place of art and the experience itself of art which lets us be shocked? That is, does art point to a possible way of relating to things insofar as art is the highest form of experience, for art lets things be? This would be an experience of acknowledging why art releases us to experience the historical world in a more vivid and refined way. It would concern the question of what it says about life, or Being, if we can experience the truth of this releasing, of letting things be seen. In this sense, perhaps art is not just confined to the creative work that lets emergencies be known, and changed, and reformed for less violent ends. Perhaps it speaks to a way of being itself—a way of being in the world which thinks and acts according to the motif of letting-things-be. This would follow what Reiner Schürmann rightly saw as the later Heidegger’s appeal to a different version of "the happening of truth"—as a way of being itself which is released, and can release:
The happening of truth is never unconditioned. Its condition is releasement. The artwork can prepare releasement, as can poetry, technology and thought…Releasement is the attitude that makes possible truth’s coming into presence. Thus, for Heidegger, releasement manifests the thing’s way to be. (Schürmann, “Heidegger and Meister Eckhart on Releasement,” 117)
In conclusion, Zabala’s interpretation of art, shock, and salvation is one that leads to a form of emancipation which can let us live in a more engaged way. It is this engagement—and the contours of its character and quality as "being released"—which speaks to such a saving power. Perhaps what needs to be affirmed in this space is how such a way of encountering things and events can be affirmed in every single aspect of our life, in being weak and subtle by letting things speak for themselves. Yet, it is through letting such events speak that the highest form of care and strength arises, for a quality of relating to things in a let-be way lets what "is" and "is not yet" be cultivated and built for our uncertain future. This is a way of being that can let those freeing and more open things come forth that lead us to emancipatory ends—closing and saying no to those ways of relating to things and event that want to keep the emancipatory potential of life shrouded and out of reach. Art saves us. But so does being released to cultivate and build, to dwell in the uncertainty of an open future.
Except as noted, all photographs are courtesy of the author.
References
Schürmann, Reiner. “Heidegger and Meister Eckhart on Releasement,” Research in Phenomenology 3, (1973). 95-119. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24654259.
Zabala, Santiago. "Diane Burko's Greatest Emergency," Art Spiel, August 26, 2024. https://artspiel.org/diane-burkos-greatest-emergency/
Zabala, Santiago. The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology After Metaphysics. Columbia University Press, 2009.
Zabala, Santiago. Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency. Columbia University Press, 2017.
