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Bruce Nauman: The True Artist Helps the World by
Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign), 1967
Head
Research Associate
Student Assistants
Objective
The work of art as a form of mediation between subjectivity and mediality
This project investigates the transformations of aesthetic experience affected by the turn toward a processual orientation that has manifested itself in the visual arts since early Modernism. The guiding concepts of ‘subject’ and ‘medium’ serve as two poles which enter into a dynamic relationship of exchange during the production of the work. According to the thesis which forms the point of departure, the work of art is a form of mediation between subjectivity and mediality which has been set into a form. This mediation, which takes place at the moment of the work's genesis, is complemented by the mediation of work and beholder which takes place during the moment of reception. The objective of this project, whose approach is based on process aesthetics, is to relate these two forms of mediation to one another. While only the process of reception itself endows the Modernist “open work” (Umberto Eco) with meaning, work of art under the conditions of the aesthetics of autonomy are produced to an increasing degree exclusively for the purpose of being experienced by beholders. In this context, an essential element of the experience of the work of art is precisely the processual character of its production whose sedimentary traces it displays.
The Self-Reflexivity of Art: The 19th-Century
During the first sponsorship period (2003-2006), the focus of research in this project was on the 19th century. The work complexes under investigation were produced under the sign of the radical upheaval of social, cultural and metaphysical frames of reference for art and of the consequent ensuing refoundation of artistic praxis. This came about through the establishment of the figure of the autonomous artist who positioned himself in opposition to society, as well as of the autonomous work of art which raised the claim to create its own value out of itself. One consequence of this development was the reflexive turning back on the part of the artist toward perceptions of self and world as well as to the potential of the representational media being deployed. Consequently, the dynamism of Modernist artistic self-reflection emerges with especial distinctness (according to the thesis of this project) when the interchange between subject and medium is taken into account. Both stand for one another (this thesis also holds) in a relationship that is almost metonymical, almost metaphorical. They are united in the “act” (Paul Valéry) to which the work of art owes its genesis and which may be conceptualized in a way that is analogous to the concept of ‘écriture’ as used in literary studies, that is to say as production, an act which resides along the interface between the medium and the writing or the inscribed subject, as well as along the boundary between materiality and immateriality.
The Dissolution of Limits within Artistic Practice: 20th-Century
The second sponsorship period (2007-2010) will be devoted to the 20th century, in particular to the period after 1960. With reference to the art produced in that century, it will be determined which consequences the developments regarded as central by this CRC (i.e., the dissolution of limits of the arts and of the aesthetic, as well as the hybridization of the arts in particular since the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s) have for this analytical approach. Two aspects in particular will be thematized:
- first the dissolution of limits and the dissolving of ‘métier’ in art in the course of the 20th century in the direction of an “art at large” (Clement Greenberg). On the basis of this development, the term ‘art’ becomes a superordinate concept capable of encompassing all media and all artistic practices, a development which not least also leads to a change in the concept of the artist and his image. With reference to exemplary individual positions, this CRC will attempt to determine how this potential for a generalized, hybrid ‘art medium’ has been conceptualized in contemporary art and has been mobilized artistically.
- second, the theoretical and practical problems of the displacement of art from work to process, which has been observable in particular since the 1960s. This processualization of art proceeds in an environment in which concepts such as centrality, essentiality and permanence tend to yield to concepts of decentralization, difference and ephemerality. With reference to the question (central to the overall program of this CRC) of the difference between art and non-art, this means a transition from the question of the aesthetic of the work (which distinguishes art from non-art objects) to the question of the aesthetics of process (which distinguishes art and non-art processes). The objective is to elaborate the terms of a new kind of specificity within the context of this generalized “art at large,” namely the specificity of artistic processes.
Subproject on Robert Rauschenberg
(Bernhard Schieder, M.A.)
In the framework of this project, the research associate will produce a dissertation on Robert Rauschenberg. The point of departure will be Rauschenberg’s silkscreen works from the early 1960s, on the basis of which the transition from the artist as the creator of images to the artist as “processor of images” will be analyzed. This transition will be investigated from three perspectives: (a) the background in a philosophy of life which apparently supports this new model of artistic practice, which is located between receptivity and productivity; (b) a theory of images tailored to Rauschenberg’s novel pictorial forms; as well as (c) the controversial question of the affirmative or critical dimensions of Rauschenberg’s art. Rauschenberg is particularly appropriate as an object of investigation within this project because in his activities as painter, sculptor, performer, dancer and stage designer, he seems to have exemplified the concept of “art at large” in an ideal-typical sense. At the same time, his pictorial work, by virtue of its incorporation of non-artistic materials, is exemplary for the dissolution of the boundaries of the ‘métiers’ of both painting and sculpture.
