Adi Efal: Distancing the Past: Alois Riegl’s Realist History
Riegl was acquainted with a peculiar turn-of-the-century Austrian variant of the neo-Kantian movement: Neo-Kantian realism. This school insisted on the reality of human apprehension, encompassing both nature and mind, and conceived of this reality as consisting of the perpetually changing distance between humans and things. Here, distance is understood as the spatio-temporal duration (Dauer) of things.
Adi Efal interprets Riegl’s concept of “Kunstwollen” from a neo-Kantian realist perspective and considers how this approach can lend insight into Riegl’s “Der moderne Denkmalkultus: Sein Wesen und seine Entstehung” (1903). In this essay, Riegl developed a typological valuation of monuments, which derives from the various attitudes humanity establishes between itself and material remnants of the past. Adi Efal argues that Riegl’s scheme of values relies on a notion of distance identical to that contained in his formulation of “Kunstwollen”. She reflects additionally on Riegl’s contributions to both a theory of history and a neo-Kantian realist conception of values.