Introduction
Whenever we engage ourselves with a work of art, be it a painting or a poem or a musical work, we, sometimes, experience a certain type of attachment to the artwork, or find something in the artwork that attracts us toward that work. This engagement with the work of art is not a choice one makes, a choice to become a participant with it. Rather, it is the work of art that becomes a participant with the observer.
What is happening in this moment of being stopped by a work of art? In simple words, the art is speaking to us. It is reaching out to us and making a claim upon our attention, and sometimes beyond our attention, upon our understanding of the world.
To say that art calls is to say something about the nature of art itself, not as a cultural phenomenon, not as a medium of expression, not as an aesthetic object, but as something that has the form of being which calls.
The intention of this article is to elaborate and defend the nature of art as call. There are four stages to the argument of this article. The first is to elaborate the nature of the call as a philosophical concept, to clarify what we mean by the claim that something calls us. The second is to discuss art’s shift from the ideal to the real, and to suggest that this shift sheds light on the nature of the call itself. The third is to elaborate the nature of the call of art, based on the philosophical theories of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Merleau-Ponty, among others. The fourth is to address the way in which the same artwork can call to different people in different ways.
What Does It Mean to Call? A Philosophical Clarification
Before we apply the notion of the call to the subject of art, it is necessary to define the notion of the call. A call is not a noise or a sound. It is an address aimed at someone. It is an address that requires a response and which establishes a relation between the caller and the one called.
The notion of the call is not an address cast randomly into space. A call is an address aimed at someone. This means that even if we do not know to whom the address is aimed, we still understand that the address is aimed at someone. A call establishes an addressee.
When a call comes to us, it places us under a demand or a requirement of a certain kind. The demand is at least to show up, and it may be to respond, to act, to do something. Martin Heidegger, in his Being and Time, pursues this idea of the call in his discussion of the call of conscience. The call of conscience does not tell us anything. It simply summons us to our own possibilities (Heidegger, 1962, p. 318). The call is not a statement. The call is a summons.
Relation means that a call requires someone to call toward. This is not because the call is produced by the relation. The call belongs to the artwork, but a call that reaches no one has not yet fulfilled itself as a call. It exists, but it remains incomplete. So, relation is not the location of the call, but the condition of its completion. When a viewer encounters the artwork, the call that was already there, reaches its fulfilment. It completes itself in the encounter.
Art’s call from the Ideal to the Real
Art has always called. But what it has called us toward has changed profoundly over the course of history. Pre-modern art was oriented toward the ideal — toward a reality that lies beyond the ordinary world of immediate experience. In the world of the ancient Greeks, the ideal of the human form was the subject matter of sculpture. Not the form of a particular human being, but the ideal form that particular human beings approximate. Renaissance painting sought to make the divine visible — to call the human being toward an encounter with that world beyond the ordinary world, the transcendent world that exceeds what is immediately present. Epic poetry told stories of heroes whose greatness was exemplary, calling the human being toward an ideal of human achievement. G.W.F. Hegel, in his Lectures on Aesthetics, describes this orientation: “Art in its classical form achieved a perfect unity of content and form in which the spiritual was made fully sensible” (Hegel, 1975, p. 75). The call of pre-modern art was a call upward — toward transcendence, toward the ideal, toward that world beyond the ordinary world.
A significant tendency within modern art represents a profound reorientation of this call. Beginning broadly with the Realist movement of the nineteenth century and continuing through Expressionism, Dadaism, and Social Realism in the twentieth century, a powerful current within modern art turned the call away from the transcendent ideal — away from the world beyond the ordinary world — and toward the world as it is actually lived, particularly by those whose lives had been rendered invisible by the dominant culture and its aesthetics.
This tendency carries within it a philosophical significance that goes beyond a mere change in subject matter. Where pre-modern art called us toward the ideal — toward a reality beyond the ordinary world — this current within modern art calls us toward a reality concealed within it, toward the conditions of poverty, violence, displacement, and injustice that familiarity, comfort, and power had made invisible. John Berger in his Ways of Seeing writes, “the way we see is always shaped by a particular culture and a particular set of power relationships” (Berger, 1972, p. 8). The call is no longer upward but inward — toward what the world has hidden from itself. Though there is another current in modern art that retains an idealist orientation, turning toward inner experience, spiritual truth, and pure form — the shift toward reality is seen in most of the arts.
Jacques Rancière offers another perspective to understand this shift. Rancière argues that every social order operates through what he calls a distribution of the sensible — an implicit arrangement that decides what is visible and what is invisible, what can be said and what cannot be said, what counts as real and what does not (Rancière, 2004, p. 12). The ideal is part of this arrangement. It determines what is worthy of being seen and represented. What falls outside the ideal, falls outside visibility altogether. When art turns toward the suppressed and the broken — toward what the dominant order had declared unworthy of attention — it is disturbing this arrangement. It is bringing into visibility what had been kept invisible. It is saying what had been kept unsayable. The shift from the ideal to the real is therefore not simply a change in what art depicts. It is a change in what art recognizes as real. And in making that change, art is doing something political — not in the narrow sense of party or policy, but in the deeper sense of deciding what the world is allowed to contain.
What remains constant across this historical shift — across the call toward the ideal and the call toward the real — is the form of the call itself. Art has always called us toward what we could not access without it: in one historical moment, toward a reality beyond the ordinary world; in another, toward a reality the ordinary world had concealed. The direction of the call has changed. The call has not.
The Ontological Structure of Art’s Call
How does art call? Art does not have consciousness. It does not have the intention to call us in the way that a person intends to speak to another person. A painting has no voice. It has no will. It has no awareness of us. And yet it calls. The question is how we can understand this calling — without subjectivizing it, so that the call becomes merely our own reaction to the work, or reifying it, as though the call were a fixed property sitting inside the artwork like one of its physical qualities.
Heidegger, in The Origin of the Work of Art, offers a way through this. He argues that the work of art does not represent reality. It reveals it. It establishes a world. It creates a space of meaning in which things can appear as what they truly are. This reveal is not something the viewer does. It is something the work does. It is an ontological event — an event that belongs to the work itself (Heidegger, 1971, p. 39). The work brings into the open what was previously concealed.
This account also challenges a common assumption. We tend to think that we stand before the artwork as detached spectators before a passive object. Heidegger’s analysis overturns this. The work does not stand before us waiting to be observed. It opens a world. And in opening a world it draws us in. We do not stand outside the opening and look at it. We are pulled inside it. This is what the call is. It is the experience of being drawn into a world the work has opened. A world we did not choose to enter but find ourselves already within.
Gadamer expands this notion further. In Truth and Method, Gadamer employs the notion of Anspruch, a German word carrying the sense of “claim,” “address,” and “demand,” to characterize the action of the artwork upon us. “The work of art does not stand before us as an object; it stands over against us and makes a claim upon us which we can neither ignore nor overlook” (Gadamer, 1975, 121). The claim of the artwork is antecedent to its interpretation. Before we even consider the question of the artwork’s meaning, before we even think to apply the relevant interpretive strategies and judgments of taste, the artwork has already addressed us.
It means that the call is not something we produce by attending to the work — it is what compels our attention in the first place. We do not decide to be called; we find ourselves already called. The call is not the result of our engagement with the work but the condition of it. This is why the ordinary model — in which we, as active subjects, approach the passive artwork — gets things backwards. The artwork’s claim is what sets the encounter in motion.
Gadamer also stresses the importance of the temporal dimension of the claim. The survival of a work of art over time, through different historical periods, is not simply a matter of accident or circumstance. It is a sign that the work of art continues to call out, continues to make a claim upon the viewer or reader, even as the nature of the viewer or reader changes. In The Relevance of the Beautiful, Gadamer suggests that the continued calling out of a work of art is a kind of testimony to its ontological power (Gadamer, 1986, p. 30).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty adds another dimension to this narrative by revealing the call of art to be not only cognitive but also embodied. In his work “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty contends that the painting calls the perceiving body before the interpreting mind. When we look at a painting, especially a landscape or a body in motion, the system of vision is called upon not as a detached scanner but as a body that is aware of space, aware of weight and texture and depth through its own embodied experience. The painting calls upon this embodied cognition. The painting does not call upon a being that is merely intellectual but a being that is already in the world, already oriented, already perceptive (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 162).
These explanations – the ontological disclosure offered by Heidegger, the aesthetic assertion offered by Gadamer, and the embodied address offered by Merleau-Ponty – collectively provide us with a description of the ontological character of the call of art. The call of art is a phenomenon that exists on three different levels at the same time: the level of world disclosure (what the artwork discloses for us to look at), the level of normative address (the pre-requirement the artwork places on us before we look at it), and the level of embodied address (the manner in which the artwork engages our entire embodied being, not just our rational selves). The three levels are interwoven; the call of art is ontological, normative, and embodied.
Does art call everyone in the same way?
However, a question arises: if art calls us, if the work has a claim on our attention that is prior to our interpretation, does this mean that art calls everyone in the same way? Does art call a universal addressee, or does art call each of us in a different way, depending on who we are, where we come from, and what we have experienced? The empirical evidence is that different people will have different experiences of a work of art. A poem that calls one reader into a deeply engaged experience of loss may not call another reader at all. A painting that calls one viewer to engage with issues of social justice may call another viewer only to look at an interesting arrangement of forms.
Kant, in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, found a similar interplay between the universal and the particular to be fundamental to aesthetic judgment. We do not simply state our personal experience of pleasure when we find an object beautiful. We state our judgment in a way that claims validity for everyone. We state our judgment as if everyone would agree with us. Also, we cannot demonstrate our judgment of an object’s beauty in the same way we can demonstrate our judgment of a logical conclusion. This is what Kant called the antinomy of taste.
But we may generalize Kant’s observation to the theory of the call. The call of art has a universal form and a particular content. The form of the call is universal: art always calls toward something; it always makes a claim that precedes interpretation; it always calls the beholder into a relation that exceeds information or argument. The formal universality of the call is what makes art recognizable as art, regardless of culture or time. But the content of the call—what each particular person is called to hear—varies with the particularity of their experience, their history, their social location. The same call calls differently to different people because they bring different worlds to the encounter with it.
This relation between the universal and the particular is, however, not a limitation of the calling power of art but rather its strength. Because the calling is received differently by different people. This allows for a dialogue about what each of us has been called to do and what the various meanings of the calling might tell us about our various stances in the world.
Conclusion
The argument of this article can be summarized in three related claims. First, the call belongs to the artwork — it is part of what the artwork fundamentally is. But the call completes itself only in relation. Without an encounter, it remains a potential that has not yet fulfilled itself. Second, what art calls us toward has changed over the course of history — from the transcendent ideal of pre-modern art to the suppressed social real of a dominant tendency within modern art. But the form of the call, the fact that art calls, has remained constant across this shift. Third, the call is universal in its form — it always originates in the work, it always makes a prior claim. But it is particular in its completion — what it becomes depends on who answers it, what world they bring to the encounter, and what the call reaches in them before they are even aware of being called.
So, it demonstrates the irreplaceability of the ontological role of art within human existence. No other human practice of making or communication requires such a call. A statistical report on poverty tells us. A political argument persuades us. A personal testimony moves us. But art does something that none of these can do. It puts us inside a reality, it makes us inhabit this reality, it involves our entire being in a confrontation with what is being revealed.
To take art as a call is to take the possibility that our understanding of the world is incomplete, that there are realities waiting to claim our attention that we have not yet allowed to reach us. Art is not a luxury or an entertainment. It is a form of address directed at the human capacity to encounter what is real, in its fullness, its difficulty, and its demand.
References
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books.
Gadamer, H.G. (1975). Truth and Method (G. Barden & J. Cumming, Trans.). Seabury Press. (Original work published 1960)
Gadamer, H.G. (1986). The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (N. Walker, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1975). Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1 (T.M. Knox, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1835)
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published 1927)
Heidegger, M. (1971). The Origin of the Work of Art: In Poetry, Language, Thought (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published 1935)
Kant, I. (2000). Critique of the Power of Judgment (P. Guyer & E. Matthews, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1790)
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). “Eye and Mind” (C. Dallery, Trans.). In J. Edie (Ed.), The Primacy of Perception. Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1960)
Rancière, J. (2004). The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (G. Rockhill, Trans.). Continuum.
Image by Satya Gummuluri