SEEING

Destroy the texts! Liberate art from the dictates of literary theory! Worringer’s work is devoted to interpreting paintings through paintings, in the sense that Artaud meant. The models built especially for the paintings and the visibility of the materials in the paintings reveal the how the paintings are created and produced, evoking a painterly language. In this way his work methods and paintings offer a kind of accessibility that manages without the knowledge of art historians. Worringer thus restores dignity to the public: his paintings reveal their arbitrariness to the viewer—the kind of arbitrariness meant by the semiotician Ferdinand de Saussures, who describes the relationship between the describing word (signifier) and the concept described (significant) as arbitrary. This relationship is based on human conventions and agreements, not on nature’s laws. Worringer questions each one of these conventions and agreements. He demands that visual conventions always be renegotiated, and that we must consider ourselves within the context of observation. A painting’s plasticity, light, shadow, and dimensions can only be physically experienced in front of the original. Worringer’s pictures demand an active viewer who physically approaches them, distances himself from them, stretches and squats, in order to experience them.