so oft

gesehen:

I take my title from the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl’s 1899 paper Die Stimmung als Inhalt der Modernen Kunst, the English translation of which settles on the admittedly much flatter “mood as content.” It is important, then, to loop in the German Stimmung, which evokes voice, tune, and attunement, as well asatmosphere and resonance. As instruments are tuned in concert, Stimmung is relational. As a philosophical concept, it can be traced back to early nineteenth-century Romantic thought, which began to dismantle a clear distinction between object and subject, understanding mood both as the property of objects – say, a landscape – as well as the receptivity of a subject – their “being in tune” with that landscape, a state not of mindless passive immersion, but of heightened awareness. Sticking to Riegl’s phrase also requires us to make a distinction between situations where mood is content – that is, a constitutive factor, at once practice and outcome – and where it is employed merely as method, what I qualified above as a form of styling. Mood is not the umber-coloured interior design art that circulates on Instagram. In considering the English word ‘content’ as it is used precisely in relation to social mediae, we might even say that in this case mood overrides content. Mood is not information, and has nothing to teach; it is a battle between mind and body, which neither has won. It is not aura, which, as Benjamin argued, is parasitical, an effect of fetishisation, but energy self-sufficient. What we register as mood is the totality of an object’s presence – a presence that necessarily also makes demands of our own. It is not that the artwork cannot tell us of anything outside itself, but that the friction it produces between object and subject manifests as its core property. This means that where mood is content there can be no “about” – what has turned so much critical art into a farce. It also means that any language present does not serve as context or meta-text, but is folded into a whole in the face of which language has long fallen short. Where there is no “about” there can also be no explanation; mood, then, is a question to writers, too, as to what a more meaningful way of relating art to language might be.

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