The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

thinking about art after the media

Ritter constantly exercised the universal importance of galvanism and electricity on
himself. in infinitely more radical self- experiments than those of the italian physicist
alessandro Volta, time and again Ritter connected his hands, lips, temples, eyes, and
other highly sensitive body parts to the positive and negative electrodes of electrical
apparatus that generated strong and weak current, and meticulously wrote up the
effects on the oscillograph that was his body. in his final years Ritter believed he could
only endure this torture by recourse to artificial paradises, like opium and alcohol,
which hastened the process of physical decay. shortly after novalis published his
Hymns to the Night, the Bavarian academy of sciences in munich appointed Ritter
professor, although he had neither a doctoral nor a post- doctoral degree. his last
larger book project was The Theory of Glowing. it would have been a theory of the
frequencies, the oscillations by which means the physical, living world could be
described, if he had been able to write it.
For the arts and their interaction with advanced science and technology Ritter’s
experiments, observations, and conclusions on sound in conjunction with electricity,
are of exceptional importance. Through radically changing the position from which
he made his observations of so- called Chladni figures, Ritter took the first step toward
proving that the graphic patterns on the oscillating hardware were the result of
different static charges and not – as was first assumed – of two different states, at
rest and in motion. ‘The body is only hard ... because of its rigidity. Where there are
different values of rigidity, there is also a value of electrical difference between bodies,
an electrical charge’ (Ritter 1805).
on the basis of such observations, and proceeding from his deep conviction of the
unity of physics, life, and art, in 1805 Ritter developed his anthropology of the arts

• one of his last publications – the contents of which are quite remarkable. Taking
  human activity as the most important point of reference, Ritter divided the previous
  history of the arts into four qualitative stages:
  
  
  • architecture and urban construction;
  
  
  • sculpture;
  
  
  • painting;
  
  
  • sound and music.
  
  
  
  

according to Ritter the first three are arts of memory. in urban architecture human
deeds are preserved in monumental form; in sculpture they are objectivized; and in
painting (which Ritter refers to as halben Raum [half- space] or Schattenkörper [shadow
bodies]) activity reappears because the observer is compelled to supplement the visual
information of two- dimensional images. it is only in the time- based form of sound that
art truly becomes itself; for Ritter, that means alive.
The critique of what belongs to the past is only of marginal interest to Ritter. his
‘beloved’ is first and foremost living nature, which he emphasizes should be the study
object of the physics of the future. in sound, as a special phenomenon with electrical
and electromagnetic properties, he sensed the vibrations of an art of the future, which
for him could only be the unity of life and physics (which for Ritter was the ‘life science’)
and which would be driven by bipolarity, the principle of life.