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Profile of the CRC 626
On 1 January 2003, the Collaborative Research Centre “Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits” was established at the Freie Universität Berlin. Collaborating on this project are researchers from the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Potsdam. Following a positive evaluation in summer 2006, a second four-year funding period commenced on 1 January 2007. During this second funding period, the CRC will encompass altogether 18 individual projects in predominantly art-related fields, as well as in other disciplines with crucial links to the arts and to aesthetics. During this second phase, the German Research Foundation will be sponsoring this CRC with funds of altogether 8.1 million euros. The headquarters of the CRC is a building in immediate proximity to the Botanical Garden in Berlin-Dahlem.
The specific characteristics of aesthetic experience and of the experience of art
As a whole, this CRC is devoted to exploring the tripartite question of (1) whether and to what degree (and with an eye toward both recent and earlier developments in the arts) it is possible to speak of the singular nature of aesthetic experience; (2) whether there exist forms of aesthetic experience that are specific to the artistic realm; (3) whether there exist forms of aesthetic experience that are specific to the individual arts. The actuality and urgency of these questions results from three distinct tendencies, each observable in the development of the arts in recent decades, and each involving the dissolution of boundaries: first, there is the progressive intermedial networking of the arts with one another, and as a consequence (secondly) a tendency toward the elimination of the boundary between art and non-art that follows in the wake of (third) the aestheticization of the lifeworld (whether or not this process is diagnosed in critical or even culturally pessimistic terms). This CRC, as a consequence, reflects a problematic with a protracted history, and approaches it, moreover, from a perspective that takes into account the far-reaching transformations of aesthetic experience and of the arts that have been effected through recent and contemporary developments. It is not so much the intention of this CRC to re-elaborate the problematic of aesthetic experience in the framework of theoretical considerations. This has been accomplished a number of times recently, as a rule within the field of philosophy. In this context, the focus is far more on the clarification of the concept of ‘aesthetic experience’ from the perspective of the problematic sketched above, as well as with reference to the contemporary status of the arts and of aesthetic experience, and moreover on the basis of specific and concrete works of art and aesthetic phenomena.
The specificity of the arts and our experience of them
With regard to the tripartite guiding question sketched above: during the first sponsorship period, the main accent of this CRC was on an elaboration of the specificity of the individual arts and on the kinds of experiences proper to each. The initial focus, then, was on specific questions which were of immediate interest to the majority of the participating disciplines (i.e., those devoted to the individual arts) for reasons related to their traditions of expertise. At the same time, we explored the potential for opening these individual disciplines up toward broader coordinated research activities for the sake of the overarching program of this CRC. Because this CRC encompasses all disciplines devoted to the arts, it is able to facilitate trial work in a hitherto nonexistent discipline, and one that was to have been institutionalized by this CRC on an experimental basis and specifically with reference to recent developments in the arts, namely Comparative Arts. The collaboration of those fields which in fact stand in close proximity with regard to their common object of investigation, namely the arts as a whole, but which have tended to operate in an isolated fashion rather than in tandem, was conceptualized as an alternative to the model according to which the various art fields are merged within the superordinate perspective of cultural studies. Based on a productive dialogue with this approach, and despite the expansion of the field of analysis to encompass highly heterogeneous objects produced in diverse media and received in highly divergent contexts, it has been the intention of the participating researchers of this CRC to avoid effacing the contours of a single object area: the object area of art with its specific claims to validity, conceptualizations of meaning and divergent experiential potentialities.
The dissolution of the boundaries between art and non-art and between the arts
During the second funding phase, this CRC is focusing its attention on the phenomenon of the dissolution of artistic boundaries. This problematic is thematized in two different dimensions: first, with respect to the dissolution of boundaries between the arts, and secondly, with respect to dissolution processes taking place between the artistic realm and extra-artistic spheres, in particular politics, religion and science.
Whether in relation to processes of boundary dissolution internal to the arts that take place under the sign of “Verfransung” (Adorno, meaning erring or wandering), in relation to instances of hybridization or “cross-over,” or in relation to mutual processes of importation between the arts and the extra-artistic sphere which are observable in recent and contemporary cultural production, priority is accorded to reflection on a concept that has played a determinative role in the development of art and of discourses about art ever since the later 18th century, and which has been the focus of increasing controversy under the sign of tendencies toward the dissolution of boundaries: the concept of aesthetic autonomy. In critical accounts put forward recently by protagonists both within and outside of the art system concerning the contemporary and future status of art, the concept of autonomy has come once again to play an essential role - whether implicitly or explicitly. Emerging in this context has been a situation characterized by strongly divergent demands on the arts, one that is at the same time marked by a fundamental confusion concerning the terminology and conceptualization of artistic autonomy. The objective of this CRC is not the reanimation of the autonomy debate in its generalized form. The center of interest lies instead on the problematic of the dissolution of boundaries, with the concept of artistic autonomy arising as one of its implications. Nonetheless, if such processes of dissolution and the rhetoric surrounding them, along with their motivations and characterizations, are to be adequately understood, then the concept of autonomy must be subjected to reflection. Such reflections on the concept of autonomy also link together the research programs of the first and second sponsorship periods: such reflection is equally relevant to questions concerning the specificity of the individual arts and to those concerning the forms of experience proper to each, which stood at the center of the first research phase, as it is to the contested notion of the phenomena of boundary dissolution which are to be investigated in the second sponsorship period, first of all in relation to the art of the present, and in tandem in the art of earlier epochs and in the art of other cultures as well.
The structure of the CRC
Alongside work on individual projects, the interdisciplinary collaboration taking place in this CRC focuses on three areas, each of which is assigned to one working group. These foci are:
- Aesthetic Experience and Language
- Processes of Medial Boundary-dissolution in the Arts
- Art and Non-Art
The intention of Focus 1: Aesthetic Experience and Language consists in the elaboration of the relationship between aesthetic experience and the language in which it is described and communicated, and by which it is itself simultaneously profoundly conditioned. With a view toward the theme of dissolution of boundaries, two areas are of special relevance: (a) boundary tendencies between aesthetic and non-aesthetic modes of writing and textual production, as well as (b) the linguistic manifestations of the interpenetration of aesthetics, politics and religion. Conducted parallel to these two working areas will be (c) a discussion of keywords vis-à-vis descriptions of aesthetic experience.
Focus 2: Processes of Medial Boundary-dissolution in the Arts poses the task of investigating processes and concepts with an eye toward the relationship between the individual arts, but also the relationship between aesthetic and extra-aesthetic phenomena, in order to determine how these relationships affect the status of the work of art and the process of meaning-generation; this investigation will be undertaken on the basis of the analysis of individual contemporary artistic strategies and exemplary works of art, as well as those from the recent and remote past. In contradistinction to Focus 3: Art and Non-art, Focus 2 is concerned with processes of boundary dissolution that are neither the consequence of external demands nor of an intentional transgression of spheres, but which instead occur in an art-immanent fashion.
Focus 3: Art and Non-Art is concerned with mixtures and transfers, but also with the delimitation or even mutual rejection of the realm of the arts and extra-artistic realms such as religion, politics, and the epistemic. From the perspective of the arts on their Other, it is a question of the procedures and techniques by means of which they intrude, not into the sister arts, but instead into non-artistic spheres, and in such a way that the elements imported from these other spheres are meant to retain precisely their non-artistic characters. But in its reversal of perspectives, Focus 3 also thematizes the various applications of the arts in politics and science, as well as the manner in which the Other of art perceives its Other, namely art.
