The Origin of the Work of Art 1.1

The answer to the question, like every genuine answer, is only the final result of the last step in a long series of questions.
Each answer remains in force as an answer only as long as it is rooted in questioning.
~     Poetry, Language, Thought. trans. Albert Hofstadter. 68.

Heidegger's essay on the nature of art loads each term slowly (very slowly) until, by the end of the first section, when we reach the now-cliched "Art is Truth that has set itself to work" all of the actants in the sentence have a nuanced and subtly developed difference from what we would immediately interpret them to mean, except perhaps "art" which has maintained its identity as an aesthetic object and must necessarily remain somewhat static as the ontological subject of the entire essay.

Heidegger defines truth as more than empirical, and "work" in its common denotation, plus the baggage of meaning "work of art" - a work as a constructed thing, but specifically interpreted not as the final product of construction, broken down into its chronological "thingly" origins, but as a completed thing serving some function and holding an inherent "artness."

Note - I'm using scare quotes, not necessarily borrowing Heidegger's words, which pile on top of each-other in a very Gertrude Steinian way after long hours of reading.

The fundamental contrast of this section, if I may be more structuralist than Heidegger would have allowed, is between "thing" and "equipment" and "work." Like me, he notes their levels of constructedness, but also some differing inherent quality, existence, or purpose. "Things" are not constructed. "Equipment" is constructed but becomes itself when inside a world. A "work" is constructed, but does not function inside a world. It functions in the striving between "world" and "earth."

The "world" and "earth" dichotomy poses some difficulties in practical interpretation at this point in the essay. The idea springs from the examination of the temple-work, or a constructed work which opens a space very literally that a painting might do more figuratively. This translation expresses it: "The world is the self-disclosing openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of an historical people. The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing" (Poetry, Language, Thought. trans. Albert Hofstadter. 47). Work brings these two, the open decisions of historical people and whatever Heidegger describes as "self-secluding"  and "concealing," together in a perpetual striving/conflict.

It took me several weeks to decide which hall Heidegger's aesthetic theory should occupy, but looking back at the entire document and appendices I feel that it must be, symbolically at least, the agent-child.

The image of a child, as such, cannot be removed from the work in which it appears any more than a pair of shoes can be removed from a Van Gogh and worn outside, but like certain images of children (James's Maisie) Heidegger's description of the Being of Art gives it some function underneath its function as object. As he says, Art is both object and subject, and even that assertion is still another series of questions that only together, and piled atop each-other, constitute an answer.

But Maisie's emptiness seems to be a space of being, rather than the nothing of the Empty Child, or the metaphorical reader/subject. The child has agency. And while Heidegger did not, as far as I can tell, attempt to attribute agency to art, he did wish to speak of it as something more than just a creation and certainly more than the mere expression of genius. By distinguishing the happening of (inside/from/because of/causing?) Art from the aesthetic experience of the artistic patron or preserver (probably two distinct modes), Heidegger seems to be making Art more than an object or space for the occupation of an observer/subject. It is a space already occupied by Truth, or the manifesting of the perpetual conflict between World and Earth, or revelation (my word, notably without religious connotations from Heidegger, but possibly some questions from me) and concealment.

Maisie herself and her novel/world/work as a whole seem to create this space where the striving between what seeks to come forth and what must remain hidden produce a profound Truth of the Modern era thrown to me from a hundred years ago. Does that mean I get to be a preserver? Yay!
But the more important point is that the novel as Art has something at its core which I am inclined to describe as "absence," as in, "an absence of information about how much Maisie absorbed or internalized about the information she/the reader was given" but I think it can also be described as a kind of space not meant for the reader to occupy alone, or except in sympathy for her situation without access to her agency.

I also need to shift my perception of these modes of child-images from a sense of constructedness to a range of subjectivity and objectivity between writer and reader, which relationship Maisie complicates horribly. If she is an absence, then is not the reader expected to occupy her, to fill her headspace and process her data? But that absence is alienating, because it is not an absence, but a concealment. We don't think Maisie's head is empty, only that it is unknown. She still makes decisions that we can't anticipate. So, like art, as art, Maisie the text both conceals and uncovers, and thus is produced by/produces Truth.

Remaining questions: The relationship between sketch and Platonic forms? The relationship between Heidegger and Plato more generally? The class context for preservers (probably depends on the relationship between history and economy)? Teleology?