Scratches as 'Aletheia' : poetising the emerging process of Being : Josef Kalleya's alternative to Modernism's aesthetics

Abstract

Josef Kalleya is the non-artist artist whose artistic work transcends that recognised and defined by twentieth-century philosophies of art. Kalleya (fig. 1) thrived on directly subverting modernist principles and schools of art against these very same principles and schools. Using a Dadaist anti-ideology to sustain divinity and sacredness in art, the Duchamp ‘chance’ and ‘choice’ categories were rooted in a divine providential hand and the modernist values of the temporary nature of artifacts so as to define eternity. Thus, Kalleya’s oeuvre was, albeit unknown, one of the most dissident acts within the modern and contemporary art scene. Similarly to what Ulrich Meinherz says on the sculptor Hans Josephsohn, one finds here a militant pre-modern tradition coupled with a radical multilayered reference: a multilayered proto-modernist reference permeated by a constant dominant line of indifference to the quotidian (fig. 2). In Kalleya’s art this was transformed from what John Berger defined as a ‘Breughel indifference’ into a subversive nihilist indifférence leading the ontic onto the ontological.