Maurice Merleau-Ponty elaborated on what he rightly called “Cézanne’s doubt” as though what was at stake for that painter was, in effect, to seize perception and render it at birth––perception “before” perception; the wonder of “it happening,” I would say, color in its occurrence, at least as regards the eye. The phenomenologist who so confidently bestows the value of “origination” upon Cézanne’s “petites sensations” must be at least a little credulous. The painter himself, who often complained of their inadequacy, wrote that they were “abstractions,” that they “prevented him from covering the canvas.” But why should it be necessary to cover the canvas? Is it forbidden to be abstract?

The doubt that gnaws at the avant-gardes did not stop with Cézanne’s “chromatic sensations” as though they were the last word, and it did not, for that matter, come any closer to stopping with the abstractions they heralded. One after another, the barriers against the current of questions from theoreticians and manifestos from the painters themselves were carried away by the necessity of testifying on behalf of the indeterminate. A formalist definition of the pictorial object, such as that proposed by Clement Greenberg when confronted with American “post-plastic” abstraction, was soon overturned by Minimalism. Do we have to have stretchers so the canvas can be taut? No. What about colors? Malevich’s black square on white had already answered this question in 1913. Is an object necessary? Body art and happenings went about proving that it was not. Is a space necessary, at least a space in which to display, as even Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917, still suggested? Daniel Buren’s work testifies that even this is subject to doubt.

Whether they belong to the current that art history calls Minimalism or Arte Povera or whatnot, the investigations of the avant-gardes one by one solicited components that one might have thought “elementary” to or at the “origin” of the art of painting. They have operated ex minimis. One would have to oppose the rigor that animates them to the principle sketched out by Theodor W. Adorno at the end of Negative Dialektik (1966), and that controls the writing in Aesthetische Theorie (1970): that the thought that “accompanies metaphysics in its decline” can only proceed in terms of “micrologies.”

Micrology is not metaphysics in crumbs, just as Newman’s painting is not Delacroix in scraps. Micrology registers the occurrence of thought as the unthought that remains to be thought in the decline of the grand philosophical thought. The avant-gardist effort records the occurrence of a perceivable “now” as something unpresentable that remains to be presented in the decline of the grand representational painting. Like micrology, the avant-garde does not worry about what happens to the “subject,” but about Is it happening? , a raw state. In this sense it belongs to the esthetic of the sublime.

In questioning the It happens, avant-garde art abandons its previous identifying role in relation to the receiving community. Even when considered, as it was by Kant, a horizon or assumption de jure rather than a reality de facto, a sensus communis (which Kant refers to when writing about beauty, not the sublime) does not jell when it comes to works of art that question. It barely coalesces, and usually too late, when these works, deposited in museums, are considered part of the community heritage and are made available for its cultural edification and pleasure. And even here we are still talking about objects or entities that can be objectified, for instance through photography.

In this situation of isolation and misunderstanding, avant-garde art is vulnerable and subject to repression. It seems only to have aggravated the identity crisis that swept these communities during the long “depression” that lasted from the ’30s until the end of “reconstruction” in the mid-’50s. It is impossible here even to suggest how the Nation-parties were struck with fear before the Who are we? and an anxiety of the void, and how they tried to convert all of this into hatred for the avant-gardes. Hildegarde Brenner’s study of artistic policy under Nazism, and the films of Hans Jürgen Syberberg, do not simply analyze these repressive maneuvers. Instead they explain how neoromantic and symbolic forms imposed by cultural commissariats and collaborating artists, painters and musicians especially, had to block the mute, negative dialectic of Is it happening? by translating the question as having to do with waiting for a fabulous “subject”: Is a pure people happening? Is the Führer happening? Is Siegfried coming? The esthetic of the sublime, thus neutralized and converted into a politics of myth, was able to construct its architecture of human “formations” on the Zeppelin Field at Nuremberg.