With his Back to the Wall 473artistic material, in obedience to the laws of form in the process of
aesthetic construction. The mimetic aspect of art should not be miscon-
strued as the mere imitation of pre-given objectivities. Instead, mimesis
assists the expression of things that elude objective representation. ‘The
survival of mimesis, the non-conceptual affinity of the subjectively pro-
duced with its unposited other, defines art as a form of knowledge and
to that extent as “rational”. For that to which the mimetic comportment
responds is the telos of knowledge, which art simultaneously blocks
with its own categories. Art completes knowledge with what is excluded
from knowledge.’^121 But art should not be confined to the realm of
knowledge. Adorno uses the concept of mimesis to underline art’s
expressive function. This can only be understood as the expression of
‘suffering – joy has proven inimical to expression, perhaps because it
has yet to exist.’^122 For this reason, the ‘primary colour’ of the authentic
art of the present ‘is black’.^123 In another, central passage of the Aes-
thetic Theory, Adorno remarks that, in a world that is out of joint, the
utopia of art ‘is draped in black’. But in its dissonance it is ‘recollection
of the possible in opposition to the actual.. .something like the im-
aginary reparation of the catastrophe of world history’.^124 Reparation
is possible in art if music, literature and painting express what does not
yet exist. In this context Adorno made a connection with Kant’s cat-
egory of natural beauty. But as ‘the trace of the non-identical in things’,
natural beauty is quite uncertain.^125 It can be equated neither with mere
nature, nor with what has been shaped by human hand. Instead, Adorno
saw natural beauty as the cipher of how nature could be. ‘What is
beautiful in nature is what appears to be more than what is literally
there.. ..As true as the fact that every object in nature can be con-
sidered beautiful is the judgement that the landscape of Tuscany is
more beautiful than the surroundings of Gelsenkirchen.’^126 The task of
art is to remind us of this potential: ‘What nature strives for in vain,
artworks fulfil: They open their eyes.’^127
With his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno succeeded in a highly complex
balancing act. He wished to show the work of art as a contradictory
unity: it both denounced and anticipated. On the one hand, it could
only preserve its authenticity by negating the catastrophic course of
the world; on the other, it was supposed to be the ‘plenipotentiary of
a better practice’.^128 As far as the work of art articulates the negative
nature of existing reality, its ruthless accusation can change that reality
for something better. The break with the principle of representation,
the concrete, and in general with what is already known was in Adorno’s
eyes the signature of modernity. In this respect he appealed to
Baudelaire’s notion of the ‘inconnu’. The mark of the avant-garde was
the ‘fraying’ of the genres of art that went hand in hand with the decay
of traditional aesthetic norms.^129 What interested Adorno here was, as
he formulated it in a talk he gave to the Berlin Academy of Art, the
erosion of the traditional boundaries of the forms of art, the way in