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WHILE HE WAS SAID TO HAVE FOUND PAUL ELBE'S WRITINGS too neoKantian, overly concerned with form, and too cosmological, Martin Heidegger spent hours looking at Klee's late paintings and expressed a keen interest that was never fulfilled to write about them. Nonetheless, the writing on art that is his most well known, "The Origin of the Work of Art," written in the mid-1930's, remained a somewhat conflicted work about the art of its time. It began as an exposition of the history of ontological concepts that issued in the distinctions between form and matter "usually employed" in aesthetics. He did so, as he put it, because we "mistrust this concept of the thing, which represents it as formed matter."1 Poised on what he termed elsewhere as an "overcoming of aesthetics,"2 this account refused to view art as representations of subjective experience. He held instead that works of art involved a more primordial struggling with the truth of their time; art is ultimately capable of opening up a domain of truth and art is especially suited to opening up such truths. Heidegger held that the conceptual history through which this origin of the work of art could be made manifest needed to be understood within the context (and a certain leveling) of its Greek origins. As a result he argued for an understanding of the thing as emerging from the earth (physis) - and the figuration (Gestaltung) of the work of art itself as a setting or bringing forth the being of such things (and their truth) into the open. Art thereby became linked with poiesis, and ultimately, a kind of human dwelling (ethos) that appropriately articulated the art and the world of its time. Infamously, in the thirties, the art of its time meant an art that would yet unite the German people - as much scholarship over the last decade has debated. Heidegger, not soon enough thereafter, seemed to demure about the connection, though he continued to think about art in connection with the truth of our time: its calculative and technological enframing (Gestell) and how we might confront the dangers of its leveling grip on us.
Many believed that this meant that Heidegger was not at all conflicted about contemporary art. In...