Objects in Air: Artworks and Their Outside around 1900

By Margareta Ingrid Christian

Margareta Ingrid Christian unpacks the ways in which, around 1900, art scholars, critics, and choreographers wrote about the artwork as an actual object in real time and space, surrounded and fluently connected to the viewer through the very air we breathe. Theorists such as Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the choreographer Rudolf Laban drew on the science of their time to examine air as the material space surrounding an artwork, establishing its “milieu,” “atmosphere,” or “environment.” Christian explores how the artwork’s external space was seen to work as an aesthetic category in its own right, beginning with Rainer Maria Rilke’s observation that Rodin’s sculpture “exhales an atmosphere” and that Cezanne’s colors create “a calm, silken air” that pervades the empty rooms where the paintings are exhibited.

Writers created an early theory of unbounded form that described what Christian calls an artwork’s ecstasis or its ability to stray outside its limits and engender its own space. Objects viewed in this perspective complicate the now-fashionable discourse of empathy aesthetics, the attention to self-projecting subjects, and the idea of the modernist self-contained artwork. For example, Christian invites us to historicize the immersive spatial installations and “environments” that have arisen since the 1960s and to consider their origins in turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetics. Throughout this beautifully written work, Christian offers ways for us to rethink entrenched narratives of aesthetics and modernism and to revisit alternatives.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226764801

Book preview

Cover Page for Objects in Air

Objects in Air

Objects in Air

Artworks and Their Outside around 1900

Margareta Ingrid Christian

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-76477-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-76480-1 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226764801.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Christian, Margareta Ingrid, author.

Title: Objects in air : artworks and their outside around 1900 / Margareta Ingrid Christian.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020048863 | ISBN 9780226764771 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226764801 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Air in art. | Space and time in art. | Arts, Modern—20th century.

Classification: LCC NX650.A37 C49 2021 | DDC 701/.8—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048863

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my parents,

and for Nora and Vera

Do you understand the power of form, of expression, of pretense, the arbitrary tyranny imposed on a helpless block, and ruling it like its own tyrannical, despotic soul? You give a head of canvas and oakum an expression of anger and leave it with it, with the convulsion, the tension enclosed once and for all, with a blind fury for which there is no outlet. . . . Weep . . . when you see the misery of imprisoned matter.

Bruno Schulz, Sklepy Cynamonowe (The Street of Crocodiles)

Contents

INTRODUCTION   Artworks and Their Modalities of Egress

The Air within and without Artworks

Politics of Extravagation

Mesologies of Form

Medium and Milieu, or the Material Spaces of Air

World Loss, Sitelessness, and the Artwork’s Environments

Aurai and Aura (Form and Space)

Empathetic Artworks, Extensive Subjects

CHAPTER 1   Aer, Aurae, Venti: Warburg’s Aerial Forms and Historical Milieus

Anima Fiorentina

Inspiration

Stimmung/Atmosphere

Milieu as Air Ambiant

The Accessories’ Milieu

Botticelli’s Milieu

The Physiology of Influence

Disciplinary Milieus

CHAPTER 2   Luftraum: Riegl’s Vitalist Mesology of Form

Horror vacui

Umgebung

Indehiscent Forms

Cubic Space (Air-Filled Empty Space)

Air Space

Respiración

External Unity

Kunstwollen

CHAPTER 3   Saturated Forms: Rilke’s and Rodin’s Sculpture of Environment

Reticence and Radiance

Aesthetico-Biological Endeavors

Archaic Torso of Apollo

Aesthetic Metabolisms

Absorbed Milieus

Gravid Forms

Forms Striving for Incompletion

Temporal Ecstasis

CHAPTER 4   The Kinesphere and the Body’s Other Spatial Envelopes in Rudolf Laban’s Theory of Dance

Choreutics

Spatiomaterial Radiance

Psychophysiologically Saturated Space

Anima, Air, Atmosphere: Laban and Kandinsky

Luftkur, Plein Air

Dance’s Biological and Architectural Lifeworlds

CODA   Space as Form

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

[ INTRODUCTION ]

Artworks and Their Modalities of Egress

The Air within and without Artworks

In his art writings, Rainer Maria Rilke observes that Rodin’s sculpture exhales an atmosphere and claims that Cézanne’s colors create a calm, silken air that pervades the empty rooms where the paintings are exhibited.¹ Rilke suggests that sculpture and painting reach out to us, and in order to give weight to the idea that artworks touch us, he invokes the subtle materiality of air and atmosphere. He implies that when we perceive an artwork, we do not merely receive forms without their matter, as Aristotle suggests in De anima;² instead, we perceive forms that convey to us some of their matter, albeit a very fine matter that is sensible the way the air is perceptible. Thus, in order to think the artwork’s ecstasis—its ability to stand outside of itself and affect us—Rilke posits air as the medium for its externalism. Taking my cue from Rilke, in this book I argue that the artwork’s external space becomes an aesthetic category in its own right in art writing around 1900. I contend that artworks continue beyond their material confines and that air is the embodiment of their continuity. In this sense, this book explores air as the material space surrounding an artwork, its milieu, and its environment in order to ask, What would an intellectual history of the idea of environment look like when told from the perspective of art writing around 1900? In contradistinction to recent studies in environmental aesthetics, which deal with the beauty of natural environments,³ this book addresses the aerial environments of the beautiful.

The fact that I begin with Rilke—the poet who was engaged with art more than any other German writer of the twentieth century—is significant because Objects in Air is a literary study of art-historical texts. It traces how Aby Warburg connects Botticelli’s representations of windblown accessories to the cultural atmosphere of the quattrocento; how Alois Riegl transgresses from the depicted air space (Luftraum) in a painting to the palpable air circulation around it; how Rilke mediates between what he describes as the inner milieu of Rodin’s statues and their external atmosphere; and how Rudolf Laban envisions unbounded dances in which movements mold not only the body but also its external, spatial envelope. I examine the language of these writers closely, and I persist with their texts’ paradoxes and contradictions—in general, with their texts’ linguistic labor—until they reveal their positive meaning, until they disclose the tenuous arguments that at times they appear to be at pains to conceal.

Figure 0.1. Julius Yls, Interesting Moment. Photo © Julius Yls

By asking about the vocabularies that ground the artwork’s ecstasy, I show the literary dimension of art-historical discourse. I thereby reveal how art history writing makes us receptive to ecstatic qualities in art. In his 1902 monograph on Rodin, Rilke notes that Rodin read Baudelaire and, through his sculptor’s perspective, saw verses that jutted out and appeared to be formed more than written, . . . lines like reliefs to the touch, and sonnets like columns with twisted capitals.⁴ Whereas in Rodin’s sculptural gaze, literary language acquires extensive qualities and stands out from the page like a relief or a column, in this book, it is conversely through the literary dimensions of art history that artworks extravagate, that they enact their out-standingness.⁵ This book engages in a dual undertaking. On the one hand, it has a materialist impetus insofar as it contends that what Gaston Bachelard called the very thin matter of air enables the artwork to reach out and touch us.⁶ On the other hand, it has a figurative thrust insofar as it builds its arguments on analyses of the poetic aspects of art writing.

Figure 0.2. Thomas Struth, Rijksmuseum 1, Amsterdam 1990. Chromogenic print; 641/2 × 831/2 in. Catalog 4121. © Thomas Struth

In 2017 the second place winner in National Geographic’s yearly travel photography contest was a photograph of Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild taken by a contestant named Julius Yls and titled Interesting Moment (fig. 0.1). The image, which won in the People category, captures how Rembrandt’s men, by looking intently outward, extend the framework of the painting to include the viewers. Whether knowingly or not, 2017’s National Geographic winner is referencing Thomas Struth’s famous series of Museum Photographs, in particular, his work titled Rijksmuseum 1, Amsterdam 1990 (1990), which shows a woman turning away from Rembrandt’s Syndics (fig. 0.2). Struth, the first living artist to have had his work featured in the Metropolitan Museum’s Great Hall, is interested in the encounter between the artwork and its surrounding space, including the architectural details of the museum and the particularities of the visitors. Both Yls’s image and Struth’s photograph capture Rembrandt’s Syndics in its emphatic address of the onlooker; they emphasize the artwork reaching out to the viewer. Whereas in Yls’s National Geographic photograph the syndics’ gaze ripples forth into modes of collective looking outside of the painting, in Struth’s image, one of the very few staged ones, the woman’s gaze doubles the syndics,’ and the colors she is wearing mirror those of the painting.⁷ Both photographs capture artworks not in their self-containment but rather in their ecstasis, that is, in their ability to step outside of themselves into the spaces environing them, in their capacity to mediate between aesthetic space and real space.

Figure 0.3. Dirck Jacobsz, Group Portrait of the Amsterdam Shooting Corporation, 1532. Found in the collection of the State Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Photo: HIP / Art Resource, NY

The Austrian art historian Alois Riegl, whose book The Group Portraiture of Holland (1902) offers one of the most compelling studies of spectatorship, was among the first to study Rembrandt’s Syndics in terms of its capacity to be drawn outside of itself into the space of the viewer. Although for the National Geographic contestant and for Struth the painting’s extravagation becomes recognizable through the mediation of photography, for Riegl, the painting’s externalism comes into its own through the mediation of language. For him, the Dutch group portraits’ projection outward goes hand in hand with their ability to depict what he terms the Luftraum, the air space, between the depicted members of a group. What does he mean by Luftraum? It is a key word that plays an important role in Riegl’s writing and that appears prominently not only in his study of Dutch group portraiture but also in his major work, The Late Roman Art Industry (1901).

Whereas an early group portrait such as Dirck Jacobsz’s Group Portrait of the Amsterdam Shooting Corporation (1532) (fig. 0.3) shows the figures spatially isolated from one another insofar as they appear to be standing in front of a two-dimensional plane and not within a three-dimensional common space, a later group portrait such as Rembrandt’s Syndics (1662) (fig. 0.4) represents figures as spatially unified, as situated in an immersive air space. The latter suggests that air can circulate among the members of the group and that they are all breathing the same air. Riegl contends that as group portraits become better at representing air space, they also become better at establishing the group’s unity: when compared with figures on earlier group portraits, Rembrandt’s figures share a common psychological quality of attentiveness, and they are caught in the same temporal moment and the same space. Significantly, however, their inner unity extends into an external unity with the viewer: that is, the more unified the figures are among themselves, the more unified their gaze at the viewer. When Riegl claims that the painting’s inner and outer unity go hand in hand, he implies that with air space, the planar space behind the figures is transformed into a three-dimensional space that does not stop at the depicted figures’ boundaries but rather projects forth, beyond the confines of the artwork, into the air space of the onlooker. This outward projection helps to constitute the ultimate group of group portraiture: the group that includes the spectator.

Figure. 0.4. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Sampling Officials of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild, also known as The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild, 1662. Oil on canvas, 751/2 × 110 in. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Riegl grapples with the Syndics’ extensiveness like Struth and the National Geographic contestant after him. While all three explore the artwork’s ability to reach out to the viewer, Riegl’s writing, in its repeated reliance on the idea of Luftraum, suggests that the vehicle of the artwork’s ecstasis is air. Much like in his earlier book Late Roman Art Industry (1901)—in which Riegl, looking at a sarcophagus relief, notes that the relief’s depicted air space is continuous with real respiration, with the palpable air circulation⁸ around the sarcophagus—in his book on group portraiture he suggests that the represented air space within Rembrandt’s Syndics is continuous with the actual air space without it. Thereby, Riegl establishes a continuity between the aerial surrounds of depicted figures and the aerial environment of artworks, pointing to the continuity between image space and corporeal space, between what, in Christian Hartard’s terms, we can call the artwork’s fictive visuality and its real objecthood.⁹

This book takes such evocations of air within and without an artwork—evocations that cut across the separate realms of reference between artwork as image and as material object—as a starting point for examining how art writing thinks the space outside of works of art at the turn of the twentieth century. It investigates the artwork’s external space as an aesthetic category in its own right and it asks, What is the medium of the artwork’s externalism? I contend that air, the medium of continuity par excellence—the mediator between inner breath and external wind, between creative inspiration and physiological respiration—is where art writing enacts the permeable boundaries between art and life. The book explores air in its various capacities—as wind and atmosphere—to turn the indiscriminate space surrounding artworks into environments. Drawing on the history of science, it studies evocations of air as the material spaces of Milieu (milieu), Umgebung (surroundings), and Umwelt (environment), and it examines air as the site of aesthetic ecologies.

In its pursuit of artworks and their unbounded forms, this book aims to recover an alternative narrative to that of the organic aesthetic form and that of the modernist self-contained artwork. The book diverges from aestheticist discourses that, reveling in the self-sufficiency of the work of art, view the intermingling of art and life as untenable. This project also diverges from many recent studies concerned with empathy aesthetics because it focuses not on viewers that project themselves into artworks but rather on artworks that stand outside of themselves. Furthermore, in its interest in the continuity between form and space, the book invites us to historicize the immersive spatial environments of minimalism from the 1960s onward and to consider their origins in turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetics.

In their suggestion that artworks overstep their physical boundaries and reach into the spaces environing them, the writers on art that I examine in this book anticipate Martin Heidegger’s later ecstatic notion of the artwork. Heidegger, to be sure, introduces the term ecstasis not in a spatial but rather in a temporal context in Being and Time, in which it refers to Dasein’s standing outside of itself through temporality.¹⁰ In chapter 3, on Rilke and Rodin, I discuss in some detail Rilke’s understanding of the sculptures’ temporal ecstasis in relation to Heidegger’s term, though on the whole the book proposes a spatial understanding of the ecstatic.¹¹ While diverging from Heidegger’s ecstatic temporality, the texts I examine nevertheless have an affinity with Heidegger’s notion of aesthetic spatiality, especially with his claim that the artwork engenders a world around itself and with his contention that sculpture collects around itself spatial domains or realms of heightened presence.¹² Thus, the texts I study anticipate Heidegger’s conception of sculpture in terms of what Andrew J. Mitchell describes as a material space of radiance in which sculptural bodies move past themselves, entering a space that is always receiving them to communicate and commingle in the physicality of the world.¹³

When in Art and Space Heidegger ponders the relation between the volume of space enclosed within a sculptural block and the space that the sculpture collects without itself, he envisions this relation not as one of demarcation but rather of fluidity:

Sculpture would be the embodiment of places. Places, in preserving and opening a region, hold something free [ein Freies in the sense of an opening] gathered around them. . . . If it stands thus, what becomes of the volume of the sculptured, place-embodying structures? Presumably, volume will no longer demarcate spaces from one another, in which surfaces surround an inner opposed to an outer.¹⁴

Sculpture, as an embodiment of place, does not set itself apart from the space around it; instead, its forms are the means of its ecstasy, and its surfaces are the vehicle of its unboundedness. This is apparent in Rilke’s reading of Rodin, in which statues have surfaces that seem so ridden by atmospheric, climactic conditions that they ripple forth into their environment, that they appear continuous with their surroundings like statues in the open air whose surfaces are exposed to the elements. Furthermore, by playing with light and shadow on his statues’ surfaces, Rodin envelopes those surfaces in a sculptural chiaroscuro in the vein of Rembrandt until the statues appear continuous with their spatial surrounds, vibrating forth into their atmosphere. Drawing on Mitchell, we can say that Rilke and the other writers on art that this book studies view the artwork’s limit permissively, showing how it is not a border of confinement but one of introduction.¹⁵

It is tempting to think that such evocations of the continuity between an artwork’s depicted air and its actual air are inherent to the medium of sculpture. For in a group sculpture, such as the statue of Laocoön and His Sons, the air among the figures is necessarily also the air between the figures and viewer. In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel describes sculpture’s sensuous spatiality (sinnlich[e] Räumlichkeit),¹⁶ which implies that a statue’s space is accessible to the senses of a viewer in a way that a two-dimensional painted figure’s space is not.¹⁷ Hegel suggests that a statue’s space is continuous with that of the viewer and, we can add, that air is a particularly apt embodiment of this sensory continuity. In this book, however, fluid transitions between internal and external air go beyond the sculptural imagination around 1900.¹⁸ They pertain to evocations of air as the sensuous space not only of sculpture but also of painting and dance. In writings of the period, various artworks become continuous with the space environing them; they overspill their form, to use a phrase by Deleuze and Guattari,¹⁹ and reach into their immediate aerial environment.

This overspill appears forcefully in Laban’s theory of dance and his concept of the Körperumraum (literally, surrounding space body).²⁰ In the latter, Laban moves fluidly between the corporeal forms and the spatial shapes of dance: he implies that the dancer not only forms her body but also molds the space around herself until body and space become continuous in kinetic figures. The dance cannot be corporeally contained by the dancer: in a manner that recalls the cubist coconstitution of figure and ground, the dancer ex-ists beyond the limits of her body.²¹ Laban’s spatial extension of dance goes hand in hand with his more general freeing of dance from constraints (such as music or drama) and his consequent conception of a free dance for which dancing in the open air became important. Dancing en plein air, as in the artists’ colony on Monte Verità in Ascona, instantiated modern dance’s variously conceived freedoms, including its freedom from solid material boundaries.²²

Politics of Extravagation

Laban, to be sure, is a highly problematic figure. From 1934 until 1937, when he emigrated to England, he served as the director of the German Dance Theater under the jurisdiction of Joseph Goebbels’s Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Although his work was eventually deemed hostile to the State,²³ Laban was involved with the National Socialists for at least three years, and his involvement points to structural affinities between an aesthetic of unstilled margins and political discourse in the first part of the twentieth century.

It is no coincidence that art writings interested in the space surrounding an artwork—in what we can describe as its environmentality, its Umgebung, Umwelt, Umraum, and Milieu—coincide with a geopolitical interest in environing space around 1900. This interest, epitomized in the ideology of Lebensraum (living space), points to the way in which similar conceptual frameworks could be appropriated for different ends. It is telling that Leo Spitzer’s work on the historical semantics of milieu introduces Laban’s notion of dance space in the context of Lebensraum.²⁴ Aesthetic and political thought since the eighteenth century, roughly since Kant and Herder, had a shared understanding of their object of study—of the artwork and the state respectively—as an organism. The biogeography of Friedrich Ratzel, who used Lebensraum for the first time explicitly, shows how around 1900 the notion of the state organism was equipped with a biological vocabulary that could scientifically legitimize and naturalize imperial ambitions of spatial expansion.²⁵ Charles Darwin’s work also hovers above both aesthetics and politics, and all of the figures in this book, from Warburg to Laban, are explicitly in dialogue with Darwin. One of the earliest iterations of Lebensraum appeared in a German review of On the Origin of Species (1859) written by the biologist Oscar Penschel; the review coined Lebensraum as a term for the English habitat and the French milieu.²⁶ Politicized evolutionary ecology justified the state’s stepping beyond its national borders precisely to strengthen its autarky, its economic self-sufficiency, and racial purity. This geopolitical dynamic of overspill bears structural resemblances to the aesthetic dynamic of ecstasis that this book traces: in some of their writings, Riegl and Rilke are intent on reconceiving the artwork’s stepping beyond its material borders as a self-enclosure, as an ecstatic enstasis in which the boundaries of the work of art have been redrawn to include its outside.

To further understand terminological affinities but also ideological divergences between aesthetic and political discourse in the period, one could consider the semantic resemblance between Lebensraum and Karl Wolfskehl’s term Daseinsbezirk (domain of being) from his essay Lebensluft (Air of Life, 1929), which influenced Walter Benjamin’s aura concept.²⁷ Whereas Lebensraum encapsulated political goals of territorial expansion in Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany, Daseinsbezirk inspired Benjamin’s later belief that the loss of an artwork’s aura, of its domain of being, enabled an aesthetic opposition to fascism. Aesthetic and political conceptions of surrounding space diverge further when it comes to their elemental mediality: the concept of Lebensraum goes hand in hand with an agrarian-Germanic ideology of blood and soil. Arguably, this ideology is reflected in Heidegger’s aesthetic environmentality understood in terms of earth. By contrast, the texts I explore conceive of artworks’ externalism in terms of air. There is, thus, a political dimension to the spatial ecology of media. The term Luftmensch (air person), a popular metaphor around 1900, encapsulates one such dimension: Luftmensch, initially a Yiddish word, was appropriated by the National Socialists to designate all Jews. It thematized the purported elemental opposition between Jews and their environments²⁸ insofar as Jews were supposed to be rootless and inhabit an aerial realm, an ether of ideals,²⁹ whereas a German’s natural elements were allegedly land, earth, soil.³⁰ Whereas Benjamin finds an artwork’s aerial envelope, its aura, politically suspect, the National Socialists frame aerial lifeworlds as dubious, showing how air could be adapted for different ideological ends. The cultural and national essentialism that subtends nineteenth-century discourses of milieu—an essentialism that underlies not only Laban’s but also Riegl’s work—adds a further dimension to the political implications of extravagation and air.

One of the aims of this book is to trace a model of aesthetic externalism that predates Walter Benjamin’s aura as cultic enclosure in the 1930s and that relies instead on an economy of fluidity, openness, and relationality. I am interested in this economy of unstilled margins as a moment in which the artwork is unified with its outside as with its other. However, as Lebensraum shows, this very dynamic of unstilled margins could also figure in different ideological projects in which the extravagation is not aesthetic but rather geopolitical and in which the oneness is not with the other but rather with nationalist and racially homogeneous groups. This homogeneity is particularly evident in the collective rhythm of Laban’s movement choirs, which are problematic in view of his penchant for thinking in terms of national and racial categories and in view of his choreographing of mass dances in the 1930s.

---

In what follows, I would like to contextualize the aesthetic idea of unbounded form and to historicize the medium of its unboundedness, the air. By drawing on scientific notions of material space, I show that the very thin matter of air is a quintessential figuration of material expressions of space such as an artwork’s milieu or environment.

Mesologies of Form

Notions of an artwork’s integrity and autonomy are common in turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetics, and they are particularly evident in references to artworks as organisms.³¹ In The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts (1893), Adolf Hildebrand refers to the artwork as an artistic organism (künstlerische[r] Organismus) while emphasizing its enclosure: The artwork is an active whole, self-contained and based upon itself, and it contrasts this separately existing reality with nature.³² A few years later, Wilhelm Worringer will reaffirm in Abstraction and Empathy (1907) the independence of the artwork-organism: Our investigations proceed from the presupposition that the work of art, as an autonomous organism, stands beside nature on equal terms and, in its deepest and innermost essence, is devoid of any connection with it.³³ Worringer’s claim, even as it denies the relation between artwork and nature, affirms the analogy between artwork and organism, illustrating thereby the centrality of the notion of the organic in conceptualizing the artwork’s self-enclosure. Since underlying the idea of organism was what Amanda Jo Goldstein, in her recent book Sweet Science (2017), terms an autotelic logic of self-organization, aesthetics resorted to the idea of organism to postulate the artwork’s self-sufficiency.³⁴

Although organic conceptions of form go back to Aristotle, who defined form alongside matter in Physics to explain the process of change in the natural world, the specific parallel between artwork and organism goes back to the beginnings of biology in late eighteenth-century natural philosophy—in particular, to what Goldstein describes as Kant’s conjoined discourses of organism and aesthetics in the Critique of Judgment (1790).³⁵ As Goldstein points out, "Kant in effect converted the problem motivating early biology (whence organization?) into its premise (organisms are self-organizing).³⁶ For Kant, a natural object such as a tree is an organized being (i.e., an organism) in the sense that it relates to itself as both cause and effect.³⁷ Whereas an organism is a self-sufficient entity, aesthetic judgment entails inner purposiveness.³⁸ Thus, aesthetic judgment relies on a mechanism of self-enclosure that is analogous to an organism’s structure of onto-itselfness. Given this tradition of affinity between aesthetic and biological form and their shared self-sufficiency, how are we to understand evocations of artworks as ecstatic objects," that is, as objects that push beyond their limits and transcend themselves? How are we to grasp the artwork-organism when it goes beyond its bounds, when it extravagates into the space of the beholder as Rembrandt’s Syndics do in Riegl’s reading?

Indeed, it is Riegl’s writings that offer us a clue. In Late Roman Art Industry, Riegl repeatedly addresses a new notion of form that he sees exemplified in impressionism’s tendency to unify forms with their atmosphere. Underlying this notion of form is a new understanding of the organism as no longer self-enclosed but rather as imbricated with a milieu; in Riegl’s words, with an Umgebung (surroundings). As if in direct refutation of Kant’s example of the tree as representing an autonomous being, Riegl adduces the example of a tree that is a collective being rather than a unit through its closed, individual form.³⁹ With the example of the tree, Riegl reconceives the organic form not in terms of a vitalist integrity but rather as a collective unity dependent on external conditioning. Artworks are thus organisms not in the sense in which these were understood in