Presenting the Unpresentable: Jean-François Lyotard’s Kantian Art-Sublime

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Rachel Zuckert
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Absolute

Abstract This article reconstructs Jean-François Lyotard’s theory of the sublime in contemporary art, focusing on his claim that such art ‘presents’ the unpresentable, and tracing its origins in Kant’s account of the sublime. I propose that Lyotard identifies a difficulty concerning Kant’s account: to understand why the disparate elements in the experience of the sublime (idea of reason, sensible representation) should be synthesized to form that experience. Lyotard recasts this difficulty as a pragmatic problem for artistic practice – how to ‘testify’ to the absolute in a non-absolute, sensibly perceivable object (the artwork) – that can be understood to drive avant-garde artistic experimentation.

scholarly journals On Lars von Trier, Enfant Terrible of Danish Art Film

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mette Hjort
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Lars Von Trier ◽  
Crucial Feature ◽  
Art Film

THE PROBLEM WITH PROVOCATION: ON LARS VON TRIER, ENFANT TERRIBLE OF DANISH ART FILM Anyone interested in contemporary art is likely to have spent a good deal of time pondering the nature and role of artistic provocation. Provocation as a crucial feature of artistic practice was largely unknown before 1800 (Walker 1999: 1). The idea of 'shocking the recipient' was, however, 'a dominant principle of artistic intent' for members of the various avant-garde movements that emerged in the early decades of the 20th century (Peter Bürger, cited in Walker: 2), and at this point the provocateur is a well-known and even expected figure in the landscape of art. It is not difficult to think of examples of artworks that are self-evidently about creating a sense of outrage. Let me mention just a few well-known works that prompted a public outcry: Rick Gibson's Human Earrings (1985), which consists of a...

scholarly journals Punctures in the Periphery. Show-Bix and the Media Conscious Practice of Per Højholt.

Nordlit ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Morten Søndergaard
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
The Media ◽  
Paradigmatic Change ◽  
Definition Of

Around 1967 and onwards, Per Højholt (1923-2004) performs a series of punctures in the periphery of a small and self-conscious avant-garde in Denmark - experiments that combine most of the known art forms and genres in a still more active dialogue with new media and technology.One of the first things Højholt engaged himself in at the time was Show-Bix, which is best described as an artist group consisting of the photographer and visual artist Poul Ib Henriksen, composer Gunner Møller Pedersen, and Per Højholt (at the time described largely as a poet). The group was operative from 1968 and until 1971, a period during which it conducted a series of complex experiments involving an audience as well as a media consciousness which is quite unique in Denmark - perhaps even more so today. In fact, I claim that Show-Bix is the visible proof of a paradigmatic change in Per Højholt's artistic practice, as well as in the overall definition of the contemporary art scene.

scholarly journals ‘A work of art does not contain the least bit of information’: Deleuze and Guattari and Contemporary Art

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 751 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Zepke
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
War Machine ◽  
A Minor

Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of Conceptual art is well known, and sits awkwardly with the current hegemony of ‘post-conceptual’ artistic practices. Equally awkward is Deleuze’s ontological and political dislike of photography, which produces a ‘snapshot’ or representation of becoming, placing cliched images directly into our brains, controlling our actions and reactions by denying us the power to think creatively. In Cinema 2 Deleuze will extend this argument to the new ‘electronic image’, which like Conceptual art turns the plane of composition into a ‘flatbed’ plane or ‘screen’ that simply formats information, and with it our interfaced brains. Today, conceptual practice, photography and digital technologies are all simply taken for granted by contemporary art, which is also happy to use “D&G” as well. But doesn’t Deleuze and Guattari’s thought require a more critical application? Doesn’t it demand a minor war-machine? What would this be in the case of contemporary artistic practice? Amongst various possibilities this paper will explore the sublime ramifications of a Deleuzean image of ‘thought’, and its position as the ‘immanent outside’ of art’s post-conceptual trajectory.

Screen Presence

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Monteiro
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Andy Warhol ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Popular Film ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
Mona Hatoum ◽  
Source Materials

Cinema plays a major role in contemporary art, yet the deeper influence of its diverse historical forms on artistic practice has received little attention. Working from a media and cultural studies perspective, Screen Presence explores the intersections of film, popular media, and art since the 1950s through the examples of four pivotal figures – Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Mona Hatoum and Douglas Gordon. While their film-related works may appear primarily as challenges to conventional cinema, these artists draw on overlooked forms of popular film culture that have been commonplace, and even dominant, in specific social contexts. Through analysis of a range of examples and source materials, Stephen Monteiro demonstrates the dependence of contemporary artists on cinema’s shifting applications and interpretations, offering a fresh understanding of the enduring impact of everyday media on how we make and view art.

Screening Statues

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Jacobs ◽  
Susan Felleman ◽  
Vito Adriaensens ◽  
Lisa Colpaert
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Film History ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
Broad Scope ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Extensive Reference

Sculpture is an artistic practice that involves material, three-dimensional, and generally static objects, whereas cinema produces immaterial, two-dimensional, kinetic images. These differences are the basis for a range of magical, mystical and phenomenological interactions between the two media. Sculptures are literally brought to life on the silver screen, while living people are turned into, or trapped inside, statuary. Sculpture motivates cinematic movement and film makes manifest the durational properties of sculptural space. This book will examine key sculptural motifs and cinematic sculpture in film history through seven chapters and an extensive reference gallery, dealing with the transformation skills of "cinemagician" Georges Méliès, the experimental art documentaries of Carl Theodor Dreyer and Henri Alekan, the statuary metaphors of modernist cinema, the mythological living statues of the peplum genre, and contemporary art practices in which film—as material and apparatus—is used as sculptural medium. The book’s broad scope and interdisciplinary approach is sure to interest scholars, amateurs and students alike.

Contemporary Art and the Problem of Music: Towards a Musical Contemporary Art

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
G. DOUGLAS BARRETT
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
Art Form

Abstract This article elaborates the art-theoretical concept of ‘the contemporary’ along with formal differences between contemporary music and contemporary art. Contemporary art emerges from the radical transformations of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that have led to post-conceptual art – a generic art beyond specific mediums that prioritizes discursive meaning and social process – while contemporary music struggles with its status as a non-conceptual art form that inherits its concept from aesthetic modernism and absolute music. The article also considers the category of sound art and discusses some of the ways it, too, is at odds with contemporary art's generic and post-conceptual condition. I argue that, despite their respective claims to contemporaneity, neither sound art nor contemporary music is contemporary in the historical sense of the term articulated in art theory. As an alternative to these categories, I propose ‘musical contemporary art’ to describe practices that depart in consequential ways from new/contemporary music and sound art.

Pop as Translation Strategy: Makishi Tsutomu's Political Pop in Okinawa

ARTMargins ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-71
Author(s):  
Hiroko Ikegami
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
Cocktail Party ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Japanese Imperialism ◽  
Translation Strategy ◽  
The Vietnam War

This essay makes the first sustained study of the Okinawan artist Makishi Tsutomu (1941–2015) who used American Pop Art vocabularies to describe the complex realities of US-occupied Okinawa. Focusing on his 1972 installation Commemorating the Reversion to the Great Empire of Japan, the essay examines the critical ambivalence of Makishi's Political Pop as a translation strategy. Despite his critique of both American and Japanese imperialism, Makishi was aware that Okinawa was inseparably entangled in it, especially in the context of the Vietnam War, which brought violence, but also economic benefits, to Okinawa. Despite his use of the American Pop idiom as a new lingua franca for contemporary art, Makishi's work did not reach either mainland or international audiences as the artist exhibited almost exclusively in Okinawa. By comparing Makishi's artistic strategies with those of a representative Okinawan novelist, Ōshiro Tatsuhiro, especially as articulated in his 1967 novella The Cocktail Party, the essay situates the significance of Makishi's project within the emerging discourse on the global neo-avant-garde.

On the “Odoresque” and “Aero-Perfumes”: Smell Related Neologisms in Avant-garde and Contemporary Art and Scholarship

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2021-2) ◽  
pp. 120-133
Author(s):  
Caro Verbeek
Keyword(s):  
Embodied Cognition ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Doctoral Dissertation ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
The Hague

For her doctoral dissertation “In Search of Lost Scents,” art and scent historian Caro Verbeek (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Kunstmuseum, The Hague) collected olfactory neologisms or newly invented smell related words from (art) historical sources ranging from 1855 to 1975, which she categorised according to the themes poetry, mind, concepts, material and synaesthesia. Three never-before-published artistic illustrations by the author help establish a more embodied cognition of the meaning of some of these concepts, as including “smell images” is impossible. In addition, she has created a “synaesthetic odour wheel” based on literary sources (2021).

THE ISSUE OF CONTEMPORANEITY AS CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL TOTALITY IN THE WORKS OF BORIS GROYS

2021 ◽  
pp. 5-18
Author(s):  
Elena Y. Baboshko ◽  
◽  
Dmitriy V. Galkin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Will To Power ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Modernist Discourse ◽  
Selection Of

The authors refer the issue of definition of contemporaneity as cultural and historical totality basing on the research results of a well-known theorist Boris Groys. Analyzing the progress of his ideas, the authors conclude, that the philosopher’s considerable contribution to the science is composed of the next phase of the development of the thesis about the art language as the base of contemporaneity construction and of the “natural selection” of contemporary art structures. The latter is not simply reduced to the postmodern “polylogue” variant, but implies a kind of contemporaneity patterns niche and “stabilization”. The patterns naturally tend to become complementary due to simple juxtaposition/ overlay in general time context. According to the authors, this circumstance does not prevent them from being turned by different political forces into locally dominating contemporaneity patterns (as in the case of Gesamkunstwerk Stalin). Contemporary art provides simple experience, that helps to retain the illusion of single and seemingly total contemporaneity. B. Groys leads us to the thought that art provides conditions for generating a significant reflective distance in relation to different social and historical situations. The distance gives an artist the opportunity to consider the reality comprehensively, given the autonomy, through the art language. However, we believe, that the most important philosopher’s achievement is not only drawing parallels between cultural and social and historical processes, based on the concept of art strategies influencing the social dynamics. He also managed to approach one of the most significant issues in culture theory and history – the opportunity to define contemporaneity as cultural and historical totality. According to his modernity theory, the origin of contemporaneity is hidden in the avant-garde art manifestation. He interprets the utopic by its nature modernist discourse, applied in art practice, through Nietzscheian will to power as redefining the new age philosophy. This article aims to analyze the progress of the issue of contemporaneity in the works of B. Groys and to explicate the complexity of considering contemporaneity as cultural and historical totality. The authors believe that the thorough study of the phenomenon of total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk) as a soviet Stalin project and critics’ opinion analysis helps to create arguments limiting the opportunity of considering contemporaneity as totality.

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