03
ON POLITICS
All novelty is but oblivion. - Francis Bacon
We would like to start this brief Editorial following one of Adorno's most insisted ideas: that an Artwork is the place of the non-identical, impossible to be dominated and subsumed. This is precisely what gives art its irreducible value, in a world in which everything tends to be instrumentalized and homogenized.
However the question that arises is: can art remain a place of resistance, of criticism and opposition without ending up being neutralized and aestheticized? Artist, critics, curators, academics, philosophers, theoreticians, spectators, the Artworld in general, are in need of providing answers to the political problems promoted by the ones who look for ways of repressing and suppressing our social and individual rights, the ones that with racist, homophobic and misogynist discourses seek to polarize and to divide even further our society and that deny the risk of environmental problems.
After some decades of use and abuse of political correctness, this is the world we are facing right now, again. The realpolitik did not just arrived, it has been established for a way and seems to be staying for long. Political Art, Activism Art and Art in general might need to evade the parameters and the temptation of the society of spectacle and entertainment in order to avoid being neutralized and aestheticized, and if this scenario is inevitable, there has to be another way to read and confront the relation existing between art and politics in order to give answers, to criticize, resist and promote change.
Now, more than ever, the priority is to defend what is left of the democratic values. The current return of the realpolitik is part of its endless come back. However, this time is not a coincidence that this return is based in right wing populism, with their alternative facts and post-truth discourses.
LUISA ORTIZ-PEREZ Towards A New Paradigm in Times of Social Amnesia
LUCIANA ACHUGAR Interview
MELANIE MAAR Perineal Visitor
FELIPE DUQUE Autonomy and Negation in Adorno
Maximilian Mauracher Material Matters
ANDREA LUMPLECKER Request for a Bar at documenta 14
ALLE DICU Dance Capsule 03Dance Capsule 02
KILIAN JÖRG Be part of the problem, not the solution
CARLOS OLIVEROS Reguetón Theory
NATALIA DOMINGUEZ RANGEL 10'01"
INA SATLEGGER Politics As Rupture
NICOLE ZIEGLER from the ongoing series bookmark(s), 2016
DAYANA HRISTOVA & COLLIN BLACK The Road to Ixtlan
02
ON AESTHETICS
Art unveils the un-reason(s) of life.
In its particular languages, art presents us the incomprehensible and unspeakable. Art reasons are communicated to us in works whenever we are able to recognize them, and aesthetic is to be considered as the way of reasoning inherent to the act of experiencing the sensible.
Kant argued that if an aesthetic judgement were to be considered by the concept “art” it would become a logically determined judgement, thus no longer essentially aesthetic. Hegel insisted in the inadequacy of the term “aesthetics” for a discourse on art. Adorno stated that “art perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived”. Along these lines and history of aesthetic thought, we didn’t have to wait for the postmodern school and for Donald Judd to argue than an artwork “needs only to be interesting” in order to observe that the relation aesthetic and art isn’t harmonic. So why to associate aesthetic and art considering the state of our cultural and political contemporary moment? Is it worth to reconsider the notion of aesthetic without falling into anachronisms? This collection of essays and pieces tries to give an approach to a category that even though it surround us on every corner, it has been maltreated by its use and abuse. We believe that this category still can play a transcendental role when it comes to clarify the reasons and the un-reasons of our Zeitgeist.
FELIPE DUQUE Contemporary Aesthetic Experience
DARIO SRBIC Aesthetics: And Smooth and Striated Space, 572-82
MONICA TITTON Zur Ästhetik des Normalen in der Mode
MAXIMILIAN MAURACHER Clear Aesthetics: The Myth Of Minimalism
ALMA CARDOSO Creative and Perceptive-Cognitive Behavior and Theatricality
ROBERT ELIAS Arguing About Art
LEONIE SEIBOLD Stimme und Verfremdung am Theater
ANNA T. STEFFNER DE MARCO Über die politische Dimension der Ästhetik des offenen Kunstwerks
JAN-HENDRIK MÜLLER Stratigraphische Bilder. Neue Ästhetiken der Montage?
KATHA SCHAAR Un_bewegt
JOHANNES SIEGMUND Apocalypse now - zur Untergangsästhetik
NICOLE ZIEGLER On Aesthetics
CHRISTOPHER SCHWEIGER Universal Hard Drive
PAULA BRÜCKE & OLIVER ALUNOVIC Das Gebäude in der Mitte der Stadt
AHINORA ANTOVA Die traditionelle Zen-Ästhetik als Ästhetik der europäischen Postmoderne
This issue pays tribute to the journal name by focusing on the term Entkunstung. Anna Steffner, Felipe Duque and Johannes Siegmund seek to unveil its historical and contextual meaning. Furthermore, their proposals attempt to reveal its potential as a useful category for interpreting, comprehending and criticizing contemporary art practices and discourses.
Alma Cardoso focuses on the relation centre-periphery in Contemporary Art by analysing the disruptions of the actual canonical discourses and its relation with the roles played by the Mexican art scene in the frame of what is known as the world art.
New York based artist Fia Matsson place emphasis on how the creative impulse is influenced by the Zeitgeist and Lisbon based artist Nicole Ziegler contributes to this edition with a conceptual piece named souvenir (words).
Felipe DuqueEntkunstung: Art After The End Of Art
Anna T. Steffner de MarcoEntkunstung als Formel kritischer Kunst
Johannes SiegmundEntkunstung durch den Plattformkapitalismus?ALMA CARDOSOTowards A New Art Criticism From Latin America
Fia MatssonArt as Inherently AutobiographicalNicole Zieglersouvenir (words)
