OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
their own essential space. However high their status and power to impress, however well-preserved and however certain their interpretation, their relocation in a collection has withdrawn them from their world. Yet even when we try to cancel or avoid such displacement of the work - by, for example, visiting the temple at its site in Paestum or Bamberg cathedral in its square the world of the work that stands there has disintegrated.
World-withdrawal and world-decay can never be reversed. The works are no longer what they were. The works themselves, it is true, are what we encounter; yet they themselves are what has been. As what has been they confront us within the realm of tradition and conservation. Henceforth, they remain nothing but objects of this kind. That they stand there before us is indeed still a consequence of their former standing-in-themselves. But it is no longer the same as that. Their former self-sufficiency has deserted them. The whole of the art industry, even if taken to extremes and with everything carried out for the sake of the works themselves, reaches only as far as the object-being of the works. This, however, does not constitute their work-being.
But does the work remain a work when it stands outside all relations? Does it not belong to the work to stand in relations? Of course - except that it remains to be asked in which relations it stands. Where does a work belong? As a work, it belongs uniquely within the region it itself opens up. For the work-being of the work presences in and only in such opening up. We said that in the work, the happening of truth is at work. The reference to van Gogh's picture tried to point to such a happening. The question arose, in this connection, as to what truth might be and how truth could happen.
We pose now the question about truth with the work in view. In order, however, to become more aware of what the question involves, it will be necessary to make the happening of truth in the work visible anew. For this attempt, let us choose a work that cannot be regarded as a work of representational art.
A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rocl)', fissured valley. The building encloses the figure of a god and within this concealment, allows it to stand forth through the columned hall within the holy precinct. Through the temple, the god is present in the temple. This presence of the god is, in itself, the extension and delimitation of the precinct as something holy. The temple and its precinct do not, however, float off into the indefinite. It is the temple work that first structures and simultaneously gathers around itself the unity of
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