In 1969 Heidegger dedicated a seminal text to the work of the Spanish Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida. The material Chillida chose for his monumental sculptures was often forged iron, but also alabaster and wood. Chillida’s work caught Heidegger’s attention precisely for its non-representational nature, which to Heidegger means that in Chillida’s sculpture there lingers the possibility of freeing man and earth from the clutches of enframing.
In the following I present a reconstruction of Heidegger’s argument in his short text dedicated to Chillida’s art. An argument, properly understood, is not the construction of correct propositions from which one derives truthful statements about certain data. An argument, properly, in its own right, brings to the fore a phenomenon in its own right, i.e., lets something appear of its own accord. Here we are concerned with space, with how space occurs. Heidegger’s text on Chillida is entitled Die Kunst und der Raum (Art and Space). One could immediately assume that Heidegger makes a rather obvious point. That is, art insofar as it is produced of some material, always occupies some space, put differently, every sculpture, every painting takes up space and hence its volume can be measured. Heidegger, however, attempts to do something else entirely. He tries to show that the sculptures of Chillida invite us to think after the meaning and the event of space in a decidedly non-scientific, but artistic and poetic way. The intent of Heidegger’s text - where intent does not mean certain outcome or desiderata, but rather something like attempting to lay bare how something occurs - is an understanding of and a response to the phenomenon of space, which does not take space as a parameter.
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