PATHS TO THE TRANS-POSTMODERN

 

Reflections on Jan de Cock’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. A Romantic Exhibition

Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden 2012

 
Bernard H.F. Taureck

 

 

THE WORK OF JAN DE COCK

 

Jan de Cock is a sculptor whose works incorporate movement, cinematography and cinematic imagery and which see space as time. Jan de Cock is at the same time a historical compressor of art as epoch and encyclopaedist of the unfolding of his artistic reality, while at the same time displaying a retrospective attachment to the culture of Romanticism.

 

Just as a scholarly poet can be referred to as a poeta doctus (Horace, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, S. Beckett, for example), we would like to suggest here that Jan de Cock be seen as a “scholarly artist”, as an ARTIFEX DOCTUS. An artifex doctus is an artist who knows that art derives not merely from skill but also from knowledge. An artifex doctus is an artist who understands how to work with intellectuals, for example Jan de Cock with the author Frank Vande Veire.

 

In his Baden-Baden exhibition “Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. A Romantic Exhibition”, Jan de Cock is treading a path he has never previously taken. He has broken with his geometric orientation. To the cinematic temporalisation of space has ultimately been added a post-postmodern diagnosis of the present.

 

Something new? Or something that brings ideas together? Or both?

Or perhaps the question is misconceived, for according to Vauvenargues in the 18th century: “Il est plus aisé de dire des choses nouvelles que de concilier celles qui ont été dites.” (It is easier to say new things than to reconcile the things that have already been said.)

 

 

THE HERMENEUTICAL CAMERA

 

For every artist a hermeneutical camera could be constructed whose zoom setting is either too close, transforming every formal aspect into the quasi-material – it is a well-known fact that if we hold an object too close to our eyes, it loses its outline and dissolves into shapeless impressions – or too distant, resulting in a dissolution of boundaries. In the hermeneutics of boundary dissolution, every objet d'art approaches that dimension at which it possesses no  extent. It becomes a dot. Thus every understanding of art objects is located somewhere between the materialism of the hyper-near and the dotism of the hyper-far.

 

Jan de Cock from hyper-near: unfinished boards, plaster, hinges. From hyper-far: a possibly modern flashing signal in galaxia postmoderna. And Jan de Cock between materialism and dotism?

  

MUSEA ET UTOPIA

 

Zeus and the Titaness of memory, Mnemosyne, engendered nine daughters, the mousai, the goddesses of inspiration of comedy, tragedy, lyric poetry, song, philosophy, rhetoric, the sciences, and astronomy. Hasn’t anyone noticed? Architecture and sculpture are missing. So too is painting and indeed all the visual arts.

 

Among the nine Muses, Thalia, Euterpe, Clio, Calliope, Erato, Terpsichore, Polyhymnia, Urania and Melpomene, there’s no Muse of the visual arts. The architects of the Parthenon, Iktinos and Kallikrates, the sculptor Phidias, the painter Apelles…..none of these were deemed to possess heavenly inspiration! As craftsmen (bánausoi) they were excluded from the circle of “artists of the word”. Only in the rinascità, which in the 19th century came to be known retrospectively as the “Renaissance”, did the craftsman or artisan working in these areas become an “artist”. (P. Burke 1992, 74–116)

In ancient times the temple of the Muses was known as the Mouseion

This term entered modern usage as the latinised word “museum”. Until the 17th century, this denoted a place for private scholarship. Then the meaning widened. It changed from “scholar’s study” to a “place for the exhibiting of art objects”.

Could anyone who might have been wondering “where  Jacqueline comes into this exhibition” be any longer in doubt that the tripartite name (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, JKO) is to be read as a Muse? In Homer the poet is instructed by the Muses. Whereas he had simply heard a rumour, his Muse knew the whole story. (Homer, Iliad 2.2 484ff.) However, the Muses could not be seen or heard. The poet did not call them; he solicited their tidings. He did not capture them in poetry; he requested something of them: their presence at a remove.

 

What is to say that Jan de Cock does not bring JKO into a similar presence at a remove? Unlike Homer and all the poets who came after him, JKO does not offer any definite tidings. She represents an imaginary place and is only there as a narrative text.

In this way the museum becomes a muso-topos. As the Muses, in their imaginary abode, occupy no actual space in our space, however often it is possible for this space to be reduced, enlarged, scaled up or down, they remain, for as long as they are Muses, in a non-place. In 1516 – at the suggestion of his printer! – Thomas More gave his work concerning the island “Nowhere” (Nusquama) a made-up Greek title meaning “Non-place” (U-topia). The muso-topos is also a utopia. The utopian idea of a perfect polis (optimus status rei publicae, the ideal national constitution as far as More was concerned) superseded the utopian knowledge and being of the Muses. At a single stroke – or rather with a wink of his eye – Jan de Cock has restored the Muse to Utopia and Utopia to the Muse.

 

 

PASSING THROUGH THE POSTMODERN

 

In 1909, five years before the outbreak of World War I, an art museum opened in Baden-Baden in a mildly neoclassical building with minimal decoration – all the closer for that to the plainer Greek buildings at Delphi – which sought the ancient home of the Muses with an asymmetry-loving soul.

Continuing the search, Jan de Cock opens his Romantic Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis exhibition with an antique prelude, a perhaps revealing progression through the postmodern. A white portal, a small green statue of Victoria – a grave sculpture that could be ordered 100 years ago from the company Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik (see Kampmann 2012) – broken white columns, a rounded, antique space, stripped of decoration, in the light-filled room of a museum. The fact that all of this can seem rather fragmentary begs the question in reply: well what isn’t fragmentary from 2,500 years ago? What has remained intact, undamaged, whole?

 

A fragment is an incomplete or broken part in which one can still discern the lost whole. A set of ruins, by contrast, is a whole whose parts are forever missing.

 T. S. Eliot’s metaphor from his extended poem The Waste Land (1922) interposes itself somewhere between the idea of the fragment and the idea of ruins: we of mankind know only

a heap of broken images

 

The Waste Land has entered the annals of culture as a kind of currency reform of modern poetry. It gives rise to a third, a post-Romantic Romantic echo of Romanticism, of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. A heap of broken images.

 

Jan de Cock is familiar with the oxygen of metaphors for he circles the globe in the reconnaissance capsule of a metaphorological aphorism: we believe in images in order to exist.

How this might be meant will be revealed later, at the end of section 6 (Romanticism). Johan Holten, director of Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, appositely suggests that there’s “an alternative visual grammar” whose process “could perhaps be compared to the smashing of a mirror”. (Holten 2012)

 

 

DUAL REALITY

 

But where,

                        but when,

                                                but what is

reality?

Qu'est-ce que le réel?

Was aber ist Wirkliches?

Che cosa è il reale?

Quid res vera?

 

The theme of Collateral Damage in a De Cock exhibition of 2002. “Images may be considered the collateral damage caused by the existence of objects.” Under this way of seeing things, reality is all which is violent. Images are the consequences of violence. However, violence can also be the consequence of an image: “An image may be considered the collateral damage caused by the existence of an object, which in turn may itself be the collateral damage caused by an image.” This describes a self-contained cycle of military and media damage.

 

For the victor, collateral damage is actually coollateral damage. A comedy is a tragedy that happens to others.

Aristotle defined the real – loosely speaking – as that which strives to fulfil its natural purpose. This may apply to living creatures, but it does not apply to celestial bodies and is therefore unsuitable as a general definition of the real.

 

Kant defined the real as everything that forms the content of our experience, in other words all that we perceive. This is too narrow and most importantly does not include the meanings that which we communicate to one another through language. The hearing of sounds is not enough, we have to grasp the meaning of the speech sounds as we listen, understand and reply. However, this meaning cannot be heard.

Hegel defined the real as unity of essence and existence, of that which is internal and that which is external. This can apply to no one, for there is no identity between our internal attitudes and the way we behave.

 

What, then, is reality? Paul Valéry considered “the real” to be mere convention, serving to segregate imagination and dream.

Philosophical thinking has replaced the question of reality with the question of how we refer to the world. “There are no 'facts' outside language, and no 'reality' other than which presents itself under some linguistic description.” (Norris in Honderich 1955, 492)

Jan de Cock has grasped this “linguistic turn” (as Richard Rorty termed it, Rorty 1967) and has presumably applied it to his own works. He has provided space and rooms. He has provided the traces of movement. Now he concedes: what?

We need to distinguish between a measurable space-time structure on the one hand and a construable interpretation structure on the other. Neither of these two structures is clear. In the Measurable Space-Time Structure (let’s call it the MSTS) we can place Zeno or Bergson. In the Construable Interpretation Structure (let’s call it CIS – not and yet perhaps, after all, to be confused with idea, idée) we can place all our cultural knowledge. Jan de Cock confines himself to two cultural signifiers for CIS and its plastic equivalents. Romanticism and Crisis. Then there are the CIS terms of the individual room names: Saturation, Spectacle, Value, Imitation, Fanatism, Overcome. These names evoke that which the Romanticism and Crisis sculptures are unable to say because they are not speaking arts. The names are evocative, they elicit and call to mind meanings.

 

Saturation: from Lat. satur, satura, sated. Satire in the form of the poetic lampoon. The satire of the Roman Empire castigated the deadening of the nerves of people’s sovereignty with the poison of happy luxuriance. Click, Cock.

 

Spectacle: from Lat. spectaculum (Gr. drâma), specto, I watch or spectate. Belongs to the current inflation of the adjective and adverb “dramatic”. Everything is now “dramatic”, in other words the object of a desire aroused through mere watching. Responsibility and participation are rejected. Whatever will happen, will happen. Click, Cock.

 

Value: from Lat. valeo, I’m worthy, I’m of value. Regarded since Oscar Wilde’s day as the opposite of “price”. We know the price of goods but not the value of things. In the philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries, the notion of value became a deceptive bearer of hope. According to Nietzsche, values – the true, the good, the beautiful – have become devalued. Result: nihilism. Consequence: value judgements cannot (any longer) be substantiated. Click, Cock.

 

Imitation: from the Lat. imitatio, gr. mímesis. This alludes to antique aesthetics as recreation of what actually happens. In the Renaissance “imitatio” meant primarily the imitation of antique forms and designs. Since Winckelmann and Romanticism, art has ceased to be imitation. If there’s imitation, it’s a question of: “nature imitates art” according to Oscar Wilde. Click, Cock.

 

Fanatism: from Lat. fanum, temple. Today: religio-political extremism. The term occurs in the 16th century in France and England. It has been rendered innocuous as “fan”. Terrorism has replaced fanaticism. As yet, terrorism has not been made safe (as “ter”, perhaps). Terrorism denotes a form of behaviour, while fanaticism is more of a state of mind. Do we need to understand “fanaticism” in order to be able to deal with terrorism? Click, Cock.

 

Overcome: takes precedence over the other CIS terms. Could refer to the impetus behind the entire JKO exhibition: overcoming all previous  artistic creation. Moving away from the MSTS to CIS. Or: the precondition of the uncertain that is common to both the MSTS und the CIS (see below, no. 5) artistic creation that goes beyond what has been done to date.

Over-: Gr. hyper-, Lat. super-, German über-, from which we get Übermensch, superman, overman, surhomme, superuomo.

Is something superman-like required to overcome what has been created up to now?

Click, Cock.

 

 

ZENO’S PARADOX OF MOTION AND CINEMATOGRAPHY

 

Let’s return once more to the measurable space-time structure MSTS because this hasn’t been clarified. Not by physics or mathematics? How could they be expected to? Physics works mainly with metaphors such as “inertia”, “resistance”, “force”, the “cosmos”. But are metaphors permissible as a way of describing reality (see Taureck 2004,#). Mathematics defines the dot as something that has no “extent” and has extent start with the line as dimension one. A line is made up of points. Therefore an extended line is made up of something without extent. Consequently, geometrical topology is founded on an impossibility. That which possesses no extent cannot join together to constitute an extent. This impossibility also possesses a hidden economic equivalent that helps the rich to conceal their wealth. Someone who earns €1 a day is poor and wretched. On the other hand, someone who earns €10,000 a day is rich and prosperous. Now, €10,000 is ten thousand times €1. But €1 means poverty.

 

Consequently, a daily income of €10,000 means that the earner is ten thousand times poor. The rich person is therefore poorer and more wretched than the poor person by the precise factor that he or she appears to be richer! The real wretched in our society are therefore the wealthy.

Jan de Cock apparently knows about all these paradoxes. Those familiar with them also know that the measurable space-time structure MSTS is just as disordered, just as uncertain, just as unreliable as the construable interpretation structure CIS. Or not? More prudent to say not that the two are equally unreliable but that they are unreliable in their different ways.

The JFO exhibition in its entirety could rest on the premise that the MSTS and the CIS areas are both disordered, certainly, and unreliable. Neither is the measure of the other but they both share the same preconditions. How to proceed? What conclusions can be drawn? To this Jan de Cock provides a singular answer: the conclusion is the simultaneity of ROMANTICISM and CRISIS.

 

The question of reality can also be measured on the basis of how we deal with Zeno’s proofs, according to which neither multiplicity nor motion can exist. These cruel proofs came to be forgotten. Newton’s cosmology was far too successful. Infinite space and infinite matter held together by the force of gravity. Hang on, said Einstein, if infinite matter occurs, pulsing, in infinite space, the central density must be zero because in proportion to the infinite, there is nothing else the finite can be. Newton had also assumed that an absolute space exists relative to which all finite spaces and motion behave and are determined. Not so, claims Einstein, all measurements of space and time occur relative to the measuring devices. Measurement presupposes mathematical equations. Measuring the duration of a process with clocks depends on a congruence between the mathematically determined intervals with the real intervals. Wait, says Einstein. We shouldn’t confuse mathematics with reality. In itself, mathematics is reliable. As soon as we relate it to reality, it’s no longer reliable.

 

The philosopher Henri Bergson made his way back to those cruel proofs of Zeno of Elea at the same time as Einstein. What are they saying? There’s no motion because motion is an impossibility. What we perceive as motion is mere appearance. For example, an arrow does not move through the air. Why not? We all assume that the arrow occupies a particular space in the air at any one time. This is something we can measure. But what does occupying a particular space at a particular time actually mean? What does it mean to be in a precise place at a given time? It means no more and no less than being motionless.

Zeno’s analysis of movement through space therefore leads to the conclusion that the movement of an object is made up of states of inactivity. But that which consists of states of inactivity must, as a whole, be inactive. Motion is therefore non-existent. It is mere appearance and illusion.

 

In two and a half thousand years, no one has succeeded in  disproving Zeno. Bergson answers him by saying that time itself is something real and that the movement of the arrow is something whole that cannot be broken down into spatially discrete phases. These assumptions are too strong, however, and conflict with the spatialised notion of time of modern physics. Zeno was criticised by Bergson. Zeno has been amplified by another development, namely the invention and cultural  establishment of film, understood as both moving and as a reproducible recording of movement. Film was to provide the entire culture of the world with a beat and a rhythm. The Bergson follower Deleuze sees film as a temporalisation of space. If we remove film from the social facts, these become very much diminished. So film may itself be regarded as a social fact. Zeno would inevitably say: this proves that I’m right. Film is made up of non-moving pictures. Motion is not real. I nevertheless concede that the way the recorded pictures are manipulated produces a stream of images.

 

However, there’s something else Zeno would have to concede: motion in film is an illusion that isn’t shattered provided it is recognised as an illusion. It unfolds in spite of its illusory character. Fernando Pessoa is right when he says: “There is no disillusionment in art because the illusion is admitted from the outset.” (Mas na arte não ha desillusão, porque a illusão fui admitida desde o principio, Pessoa 237)

Film, the moving and reproducible recording of movement thus reveals itself to be a kind of hyer-alchemy. Out of non-being it brings forth being; out of non-motion it brings forth motion. Film both confirms and overcomes Zeno’s proof of motionlessness. Jan de Cock takes this confirmation-overcoming as a starting point.

 

Another conclusion suggests itself: film is a materialised and malleable form of that common precondition for  MSTS and CIS. The – in itself – unclear motionlessness of reality appears on the side of the construable interpretation structure (CIS) as flux.

 

 

TRUTH AND ROMANTICISM

 

If one strips capitalist man of his ambiguity, one is left with homo oeconomicus. The capitalist sails the sea of crises. His ship rocks and he persuades himself that because it is rocking, it won’t go under. His shipwrecked will end up in no graveyard, not even of the memory. Why not? Homo oeconomicus did not take the helm. He has swapped the sea voyage for the world as shopping mall. He demands choice, he demands information, he demands foresight. But the shopping mall is his undoing. Out of the meat he wishes to eat crawl maggots of the kind that devour all. He looks at the maggots. They crawl visibly as soft ice cream and invisibly as fear and loathing in every spot. In the maggot homo oeconomicus sees himself. Horrified, he flees, back to capitalism and from capitalism back to the being with whom it all began, homo romanticus. Homo romanticus has not yet explained anything. He’s the fire in the sky and the water in the depths.

 

What is Romanticism? Literary history offers around 12,000 definitions of “Romanticism”, providing a text-book definition of inflation. Nevertheless, it could be that something has been overlooked. But what?

During the Enlightenment, Lessing expressed an emphatic preference for the quest for truth rather than the truth itself. Were God to hold in his right hand the absolute truth and in his left the simple but ever-avid hankering after the truth – even with the rider that I would only ever be wrong – and say to me: choose! I would throw myself at his left hand with the words: Father, give me this! The unadulterated truth is for thee alone. In the early days of the Enlightenment in France the philosopher Fontenelle went much further. Truth, he claimed, ought not to reveal itself as such: Si par malheur la Vérité se montrait telle qu'elle est, tout serait perdu. (If the truth revealed itself for what it really is, all would be lost.) The entire Enlightenment saw itself as a quest for the truth. During the Romantic era in Europe and America, by contrast, what had never previously be seen was now ubiquitous: I have the truth, we have the truth, we have found, while the others have merely looked. Never was the truth more unveiled and divinity closer than during the Romantic period. Kant had placed a limit on the possibility of knowledge of the existence of things in themselves. Romanticism laid claim to insights that mocked this limit.

Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,– all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836. In 1795 the philosopher Schelling had noted: Present in us all is a secret, wonderful ability to withdraw from the changing times into our innermost self, divested of all that came from the outside, and there, in the form of the  immutable, contemplate the eternal in us. This contemplation is the most internal and individual experience, on which alone all that we know and believe of a supersensory world depends […] During this moment of contemplation, time and duration fade into insignificance: we are not in time but time – or rather not her but pure and absolute eternity – is in us. Charles Baudelaire, in his third poem in the Fleurs du Mal 1857-61: Par delà le soleil, par delà les éthers/ Par delà les confins des sphères étoilées, /Mon esprit, tu te meus avec agilité (Elévation). Towards the end of the 18th century, Novalis notes: Is not then the cosmos in us? The depths of our spirit are unknown to us. – Internally leads the mysterious path. Inside ourselves or nowhere is eternity with its worlds – the past and the future. The external world is the world of shadows, which it casts on the empire of light.

 

The European/North American Romantic Age was a time of the individual and eternal experiencing of truth. This experiencing of the truth, however, also knew the pain of withdrawal of the truth and it knew the pleasure that accompanies this suffering. (See Mori 2009, 266-289)

The Romantic era had various consequences of which one was that it became the object of attempts at systematisation. Novalis wanted to unify it theocratically; Hegel metaphysically. Marx recognised that capitalism, as it was later called, with its profit orientation and crises, represented a squandered Romanticism. In this way Romanticism remained alive under a different name.

 

But what happened to Romanticism’s aesthetic element? Must it be historicised and integrated into the development of the 19th century? Jan de Cock does not answer this question in the affirmative. He does not see the thing that was unique about Romanticism, its possession of the truth, as a lost Illusion. To homo oeconomicus fleeing back to homo romanticus, he can mean: flight is unnecessary. On the contrary, there is something that represents the Romantic possession of the truth in the here and now. It’s an occurrence in which we all participate. An aura. Cinematographic images. It’s film, it’s cinematography. Cinematic images, goes Jean-Luc Godard’s message in his “Histoires du cinéma”, much valued by de Cock, redeem reality.

 

The Romantic possession of the truth is thus endowed with a systematisation both aesthetic and theological. Between reality and the image is a relationship of redemption. Cinematic images liberate reality from the alien and lead it to itself. This thesis takes for granted the previously described confirmation/overcoming of Zeno by film. It also goes much further, however, asserting that film impacts on reality. According to Godard, reality is redeemed from its rigidity by cinema.

De Cock’s exhibits entitled Romantic consist of provisional structures resembling building plans. Were one to actually construct them, they might contain more plans than would be possible to execute. This building could prove to be a cinematography that implies something beyond its realisation.

 

 

ROAD MAPS: IDENTITY AND DECONSTRUCTION

 

De Cock’s JKO exhibition fulfils two of the modern conditions formulated by 20th-century philosophy. Namely identity and deconstruction.

Regarding identity: “To claim that two things are identical is nonsense and to claim of one thing that it is identical to itself, says absolutely nothing.” So writes Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus no. 5.5303. Identity is either absurd or empty. De Cock does not attempt to demonstrate that different things are identical. The Romantic and Crisis sculptures resemble one another and are not subject to the imperative of an equals sign. The exhibition as a whole is not identical to itself either. Rather, it brings together three exhibitions in one: sculptures, texts, books.

Regarding deconstruction: Jacques Derrida found that there is nothing outside the text or outside the context. There is no natural presence. Any transcendental meaning, with which we want to fix and unite something, collapses of itself. He calls this “déconstruction”. What takes the place of presence and fixation? It is difference, as something that remains “of the future”, eventful and uncontrollable. What is, is coming. We can never refer to its presence. By referring to something through language, we displace what it is we are referring to. (See Taureck 2009, 65-70)

De Cock’s Jacqueline also fulfils this condition. Whenever we refer to her, she eludes us. Referring to something means displacing it.

That the absurdity of identity, the emptiness of identity and the pattern of referencing and displacement are fulfilled by the JFK exhibition shows simply that Jan de Cock operates as an artifex doctus. He doesn’t illustrate the arguments of Wittgenstein or Derrida. He merely observes the road map drawn up by them.

 

 

EXPOSING THE CRISIS

 

Communication, as the antique world knew, is partly pleasing (delectare), partly instructive (docere) and partly moving (movere). There are two pleasant insights that any visitor will acquire relatively easily: Jacqueline’s utopian Muse status and the kitsch-exposing performance, as pseudo-aura of the preliminary area. This performance employs three different means: the reconstructed into a whole (the portal, the green funerary statue), the fragmentary (the pieces of column, shaft and capital, the walls of the second preliminary room only partially painted in Jacqueline pink) and the degenerate (the tiny artificial and gaudily illuminated Christmas tree).

With the switch from the exposure of kitsch to the Romantic and Crisis sculptures comes another insight: we are passing through the postmodern (understood by Charles Jencks as a simultaneously elitist and popular visual language) to the post-postmodern. Uncompromising cultural criticism is being exercised here. We have to cross through the postmodern. It prevented or prevents us from posing and answering key questions. Postmodernism was unwilling or unable to ask and examine those questions about Romanticism, about the two realities MSTS and CIS, about the position of cinematography.

We are told every day that we are in the middle of an economic crisis. This crisis talk is itself proving to be part of the crisis. Of what does the economic crisis consist? Among all the answers, one in particular should not be forgotten: society regards an increase in gross domestic product as growth. This results in a manipulated metaphor because growth in natural processes observes limits whereas economic growth is expected to occur without boundaries. The growth metaphor for economic activity is judged to be the basis of all prosperity and therefore as the prerequisite for successful socialisation. (See Taureck 2011)

With his Crisis sculptures, Jan de Cock exposes and breaks the spell of this deception. From root-like, at the same time sore and bound feet, he causes vertical parts, which always include hinges, to soar upwards. This gives rise to an allegory exposing the deception of the growth metaphor. Growth and the economy do not belong together. The Crisis sculptures demonstrate an incompatibility. The harsh reality of hyperproduction and hyperdemand reveals itself to be unreal. The artifex doctus has succeeded in exposing them as delusory.

A sculptural dedication to Brancusi supplements the docere with a touch of the movere: a post-postmodernism will only be sustainable when it becomes a trans-postmodernism.

 

 

 

  • Literature
  • Burke, P. (1992) Die Renaissance in Italien. Sozialgeschichte einer Kultur zwischen Tradition und Erfindung [The Renaissance in Italy. Social history of a culture between tradition and invention] (Wagenbach: Berlin)
  • Holten, J. (2012) Foreword 37-b-IV. Handbuch to: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Eine Romantische Ausstellung / A Romantic Exhibition von/by Jan de Cock. Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König)
  • Kampmann, M. (2012) Idolatrien im Zeitalter des Baumarkts – Jan de Cock in der Kunsthalle Baden-Baden [Idolatries in the age of the DIY hypermarket – Jan de Cock at Kunsthalle baden-Baden]
  • Mori, M. (2009) Storia della filosofia moderna [Story of modern philosophy](Laterza: Bari)
  • Norris. Chr. (1995) Article: “Linguistic turn” in: T. Honderich, ed. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford University Press: Oxford /New York, 492)
  • Pessoa, F. (date not known) O livro do desassosego. 1a Parte. (Livros de bolso, Europa-América: Mem Martins)
  • Rorty, R. Ed. (1967) The Linguistic Turn. Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago Univ. Press: Chicago)
  • Taureck, B. H. F. (2004) Metaphern und Gleichnisse in der Philosophie. Versuch einer kritischen Ikonologie der Philosophie [Metaphors and allegories in philosophy. Attempt at a critical iconography of philosophy] (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main)
  • Idem. (2009) Die Antworten der Philosophen. Ein Lexikon [The answers of the philosophers] (Fink: Munich)
  • Idem. (2011) Wachstum über alles – die Karriere einer Metapher/ Grwoth Above All – the Carrer of a Metaphor.. In: Über die Metapher des Wachstums. On the Metaphor of Growth. Hannovedr, Bsel, Frankfurt 2011. Christoph Merian Verlag, www.merianverlag.ch
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  • Acknowledgements
  • I would like to express my thanks to Jan de Cock for his interest in this essay. Also to Johan Holten, Johannes Honeck and Dr. Wolfram Frietsch for their close collaboration at the exhibition site. I am also grateful to Dr. Matthias Kampmann for his illuminating insights of an art-historical nature and to my wife Gisela U. Taureck for her unfailing emotional and intellectual support.