700 Künste; Bildende und angewandte Kunst
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Institute
Insight by de—sign
(2023)
The calculus of design is a diagrammatic approach towards the relationship between design and insight. The thesis I am evolving is that insights are not discovered, gained, explored, revealed, or mined, but are operatively de—signed. The de in design neglects the contingency of the space towards the sign. The — is the drawing of a distinction within the operation. Space collapses through the negativity of the sign; the command draws a distinction that neglects the space for the form's sake. The operation to de—sign is counterintuitively not the creation of signs, but their removal, the exclusion of possible sign propositions of space. De—sign is thus an act of exclusion; the possibilities of space are crossed into form.
Imagines
(2017)
This series seeks to broaden the scholarly community’s understanding of the reception of classical antiquity in the visual and performing arts. A particular focus will be drawn on the 20th and 21st centuries and on media that have been traditionally neglected because considered “commercial” and/or “popular”, such as comics, advertising, digital media, design, fashion, and theme parks. It challenges traditional, and still very widespread, assumptions that distinguish “high” from “popular” culture, but also demonstrates the indisputable importance that classical antiquity enjoys in the modern and postmodern world, and all across the planet, carefully looking at forms of Classical Receptions outside the “traditional” regions object of such studies. Through a consistent shift from the traditional, academic approach, the series is the product of a continuous dialogue between scholars on the one side, and “producers” of classical reception – painters, sculptors, photographs, architects, designers, etc. –on the other, who write about their mechanisms of appropriation of the Ancient world . Each book highlights the popularity of antiquity today and reveals the forms and mechanisms of its reception. The series thus explains the choice of subjects and motives, the elaboration and re-mediatization processes taking place in the creative act, as well as the complexity of the “reception chains”, which make it today impossible, for instance, to visualize the ancient world without the filter of historical movies.
When considering artists from the second half of the twentieth century who used steel as material for their sculptures, Eduardo Chillida and Richard Serra are among the first to come to mind. Both artists are prominent in public spaces and both present large-size sculptures which challenge viewers. Both use clear geometrical patterns, and both develop their oeuvre from an intense involvement with the properties and possibilities of the material. However, their sculptures show fundamentally diverging conceptions not only in the manner of their creation, but also in their reception. Chillida and Serra have almost nothing in common; they never made reference to each other, although their sculptures often stand in neighbourly proximity. Nevertheless a comparison or more precisely a synopsis can illustrate a number of problems that rise in dealing with sculpture today. Serra’s works convince mostly when they concentrate on complex formal qualities resulting from constellations of geometrical forms and given spaces. However, sculptures in public space consistently have the difficult task of creating memorial places which ideally speak for themselves. Chillida’s sculptures fulfil this purpose because of their expressive pictorial potential. The material COR-TEN steel provides them with power and emphasis.
B6112—Art after All
(2018)
B6112 is a collective anticapitalist, feminist, antiracist, and queer transmedial theatre production. Welcome to our artwork! Our theatre, our art, our poetry, and our work are weapons of struggle. Art does not take place in a political, social, or economic vacuum. Art takes place in world structured by imperialism and its slaughter, war, destruction, commerce, and slavery. Art must engage with this in both content and form. Otherwise it is obsolete. B6112 advocates a theatre that calls for revolution, reveals relationships of domination, denounces grievances, names guilty parties, presents resistance strategies, explores them, rejects them. B6112 stands for the elimination of nationalisms and gender inequality, for a global citizenship, for a world community in which all people peacefully coexist in equal living conditions. B6112 stands for self-organization and emancipation, for a hierarchy-free theatre that has a mimetic and thus exemplary effect on society. In the face of global disasters, we reject an entertainment theatre or a theatre of display that acts as an opiate in the society. Only when our goals have been achieved will we be able to renegotiate the role of the theatre for our society, redefine its content, and redefine the question of relevance.
Simultaneously speculative and inspired by everyday experiences, this volume develops an aesthetics of metabolism that offers a new perspective on the human-environment relation, one that is processual, relational, and not dependent on conscious thought. In art installations, design prototypes, and researchcreation projects that utilize air, light, or temperature to impact subjective experience the author finds aesthetic milieus that shift our awareness to the role of different sense modalities in aesthetic experience. Metabolic and atmospheric processes allow for an aesthetics besides and beyond the usually dominant visual sense.
From object to process
(2019)
One of the most difficult tasks today is trying to grasp the presence of computing. The almost ubiquitous and diverse forms of networked computers (in all their stationary, mobile, embedded, and autonomous modes) create a nearly overwhelming complexity. To speak of what is here evading and present at the same time, the paper proposes to reconsider the concept of interface, its historical roots, and its heuristic advantages for an analysis and critique of the current and especially everyday spread of computerization. The question of interfaces leads to isolable conditions and processes of conduction, as well as to the complexity of the cooperation formed by them. It opens both an investigative horizon and a mode of analysis, which always asks for further interface levels involved in the phenomenon I am currently investigating. As an example, the paper turns to the displacement of the file with the launch of the iPhone in 2007 and its comeback in 2017 with the "Files" apps. Both developments are profoundly related to the establishment of computers as permanently networked machines, whereby their functionality, depresentations, and ideology come into focus.
In this cartography, I examine M.K. Gandhi’s practice of fasting for political purposes from a specifically aesthetic perspective. In other words, to foreground their dramatic qualities, how they in their expressive repetition, patterning and stylization produced a/effected heightened forms of emotions. To carry out this task, I follow the theater scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte’s features that give name to her book Äesthetik des Performativen (2004). The cartography is framed in a philosophical presentation of Gandhi’s discourse as well as of his historical sources. Moreover, as a second frame, I historicize the fasts, by means of a typology and teleology in context.
The historically and discoursively framed cartography maps four main dimensions that define the aesthetics of the performative: mediality, materiality, semioticity and aestheticity. The first part analyses the medial platforms in which the fasts as events have been historically recorded and in which they have left their traces and inscriptions. These historical sources are namely, newspapers, images, newsreels and a documentary film. Secondly, the material dimension depicts Gandhi’s corporeal condition, as well as the spatiality and temporality of the fasts. In the third place, I revise and reformulate critically Fischer-Lichte’s concepts of “presence” and “representation” with resonating concepts of G. C. Spivak and J. Rancière. This revision illustrates Gandhi’s fasts and shows the process of how an individual may become the embodiment or representation of a national body-politic. The last chapter of the cartography explores the autopoetic-feedback loop between Gandhi and the people and finishes with a comparison of the mise en scène of the hunger artists with the fasts of the Indian the politician, social reformer, and theologian. The text concludes interpreting Gandhi’s practice of fasting under the light of the concepts of “intellectual emancipation” and “de-subjectivation” of the philosopher J. Rancière.
The four main concerns of this cartography are: Firstly, in the field of Gandhi’s reception, to explore the aesthetic dimension as both alternative and complementary to the two hegemonic interpretative lenses, i.e. a hagiographic or a secular political understanding of the fasts. From a theoretical perspective, the cartography pursues to be a transdisciplinary experiment that aims at deploying concepts that have been traditionally developed, derived from and used in the field of the arts (theater, film, literature, aesthetic performance, etc.) in the field of the political. In brief, inverting an expression of Rancière, to understand politics as aesthetics. Thirdly, from a thematic point of view, the cartography inquires the historical forms of staging and perception of hunger. Last yet importantly, it is an inquiry of the practice of fasting as nonviolence, what Gandhi, its most sophisticated modern theoretician and practitioner considered its most radical expression.
Introduction
(2020)