반 고흐의 〈낡은 구두〉
This essay deals with the debates between Martin Heidegger, Meyer Schapiro and Jacques Derrida on the truth in Vincent Van Gogh’s Painting of Pair if Shoes. Heidegger said that this painting let us know what shoes are in truth. This represented equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. This art work opens up in its own way the Being of beings, and this opening up, i.e., this deconcealing, i.e., the truth of beings, happens in the work. Shapiro criticized Heidegger that this attribution of Van Gogh’s picture of the shoes to a peasant woman is false. The shoes are not those of a peasant woman but of a male city dweller, Van Gogh’s own shoes at the time he was living in Paris. He accused Heidegger that he deceived himself, that he imagined everything and projected it into the painting. According to Schapiro, this painting is worth Van Gogh’s self portrait. Derrida argues that this episode is not a theoretical or philosophical dispute for the interpretation of a work but a matter of history and politics. He says that this shoes are painted shoes and they will not returned to the rightful owner, to the original subject. Painting is anterior to the discourse about truth, anterior to the desire for restitution. Finally, his essay is lodged against the discourse of belonging, against the discourse of attribution. Art History is based on the connoisseurship, in other words, the discourse of attribution. Then how can we art historians react to Derrida’s accusations? Derrida says that “one dreams of a painting without truth, which without debt and running the risk of no longer saying anything to anyone, would still not give up painting”. Yet, this resembles Kant’s definition of aesthetic experience which is ‘without purpose’, ‘without use’, ‘without interest’. The ghost step which still comes to haunt the painted shoes is not so much peasant woman’s nor Van Gogh’s, neither Heidegger’s nor Schapiro’s, but Kant’s. Derrida further claims that painting suspends its own meaning, risking the loss of meaning. The truth may have something to do with the ownership of the history rather than the truth, or than the origin of truth, the truth of truth. There exist contests for the identity and truth. Then this debate is not so much the debate between disciplines, i.e., between art histoy and philosophy of art, but a matter of world-view. Do we believe that we owe the world some debt? The debt of meaning, truth, whatever. The promise of Cezanne, “I owe you the truth in painting, and I wil tell it to you” is only a performative promise. Yet, do we expect something in his promise? Truth or not, the promise always belongs to the future which is not yet rome. Thus, promise, the promise on the truth of painting always takes the form of belief and expectation before it turns into mere traces of truth.