Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (2002) was the most sophisticated theoretical text to accompany the new generation of artists that emerged in the 1990s. Compared with the writings of the New York-based October critics, however, who framed the postmodern appropriation movement of the 1980s (Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Hans Haacke) Bourriaud’s text lacks theoretical depth and cohesion. Relational Aesthetics contains a section on the aesthetics of Guattari but Bourriaud pushes this to the end of his book as if he does not want to scare the reader away with too much theory. Most of the book consists of mentioning the names of artists and providing very short glosses on particular works which they have produced. The only sustained analysis of a particular artist is devoted to Felix Gonzalez-Torres. (more…)
Nietzsche almost breaks with romanticism. He almost reaches into the postmodern scientific world: the world of quanta, complexity and connectionism. But, unsurprisingly given his historical position, he does not quite make it. This is plain when we examine the relationship between his central principle of the will to power and his reception of Darwin’s theory of evolution. What is problematic is that Nietzsche refused to accept natural selection–which we can now understand as deconstructing the boundary between inner and outer, organism/environment, animate/inanimate.
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THIS IS A PART OF A DRAFT INTRODUCTION TO A BOOK I AM WORKING ON, ANY COMMENTS ARE WELCOME
Transgressive aesthetics is ostensibly distinguished from aestheticism, l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake), by the incorporation of an ethical dimension. Upon examination, however, the relationship between ethics and transgressive aesthetics is profoundly equivocal. Aesthetically, evil and injustice are ultimately more interesting than goodness and justice. Without injustice and “evil” there would be no literature and there would be no political art. Surreptitiously aesthetic practice feeds on injustice and evil. Transgressive aesthetics can even become antiethical as is evident in the surrealists’ fascination with the Marquis de Sade and the philosophical and literary elaboration of sado-masochism in the writings of Bataille, we can also add the ethical aporia evident in the contemporary fine art of Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhoades, Gregor Schneider, Santiago Sierra to name but a few. (more…)
For most of human history art has been associated with religion and spirituality. This changed with the advent of modernity. Religion was one of the victims of modernity and the rise of science. In this sense science had a massive impact on society. On the other hand modern science distances itself from morality: it lends itself to Kant’s division of human faculties into rational, moral and aesthetic. Science remains in the rational divorced from the task of creating values for society. And it can argued that art follows the logic of modernist specialisation and remains in the domain of the aesthetic, also divorced from morality. This is the phenomenon we can refer to as aestheticism. Anti-aestheticism fundamentally refers to a putative attempt to release art from aestheticism, to bring it “into life”, to make it a moral force resisting the alienating, nihilistic, materialism of capitalism.
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The romantic literary theorist Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) was, as Michael Weston explains, inspired by Kantian philosophy to the extent that he exclaimed “poetry and philosophy should be made one” (Schlegel 1971: 115; in Weston 2001: 8). And the basis of this modern philosophical poetry lies the fundamental unknowableness of the Kantian thing-in-itself, unknowable because according to Kant’s philosophy the synthesising genius of imagination effectively creates reality. (more…)
