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Fitzgerald Kusz: Papiercollage, in: Wunsch-
konzert. Du hast Hand und Fuss, was willst
du mehr? Gersthofen: Maro-Verlag 1971,
ohne Paginierung
Head
Research Associates
Rainer Falk, M.A. / Dr. Dirck Linck
Student Assistants
Reinhard Möller / Rina Schmeller
Objective
The topic of this subproject is the art-critical thematization of aesthetic experience in the media of the arts, the resigned assertion of its loss and attempts at its recovery in variously defined borderline areas. The subproject is devoted to this figure under two different aspects: the ambivalent constitution of the object of literary studies in edition philology and the dismantling of art and the re-foundation of aesthetic semiosis in unstable boundary zones located between art and anti-art (pop).
Subproject 1: Aesthetic Experience and the Philology of Editions
(Rainer Falk M.A.)
During the second funding phase, this subproject directs its attention toward all subject disciplines in which editorial practices are applied. For this procedure, the concept of the ‘edition,’ conditioned by philology, must of necessity be expanded. Above and beyond the conventional editing of texts, we will devote our attention to other comparable processes, for instance choreographic notation and the graphic transcription of electronic music.
This conceptual expansion is motivated by the discovery of a fundamental absence of reflection on the part of traditional editorial activities concerning the consequences for aesthetic experience of the medial transformation occurring within editorial processes (transcription, the production of facsimiles, digitalization); objectively, this expansion is founded on the relevance of non-significant dimensions of art for a new non-objectivistic work concept, one that also attempts to take into account the framing aspect of the work which is not itself a part of the form of the work, yet cannot be separated from it entirely. If in literature it is a question of the quality of the appearance of the words and sentences themselves, then in the other disciplines it is a question of the coming to appearance of sequences of movements, sounds and noises, lines, etc.. To be sure, other art forms and media have long since developed notational practices relevant to the production of editions, yet still absent to a large extent is their embedding in a context that theorizes the edition.
The project of an aesthetics of the edition, therefore, turns toward the dominant concepts of the edition and their logics of the inclusion of parameters that are constitutive of meaning and their programmatic exclusions of presumably ‘merely’ aesthetic phenomena, which however nonetheless codetermine the work of the editor. To be sketched are the potentialities and procedures of a new approach to editorial activity, one that would do justice to the performative, affective and processual dimensions which have to date been regarded as marginal phenomena. Starting from findings concerning the increasing tension between textual criticism and interpretive activity in the philological domain, we will attempt to determine whether this relationship presents itself in a similar way in the other arts and media, and the degree to which the specific traditions of literary editorial activities might be transferred to other arts and other media. The hypothesis is that in the history of the diverse arts and their scholarly examination, the center of gravity has been progressively shifted toward the art of interpretation. The explicit objective is to moderate the relationship between these ‘soft’ field of philology and its ‘hard’ counterpart, the discipline of editorial treatment.
Subproject 2: A Poetics of Trash.
The (Non-)Literature of the German Beat and Pop Generation
(Dr. Dirck Linck)
This project in the field of literary history investigates exemplary literary denials of aesthetic experienceability, and those paradoxical attempts at salvaging it. The texts of the German beat and pop literature of the 1960s and early 1970s, generated from pre-found materials encountered within the field of tension between documentation and semanticization, were not conceived with their success as art in mind: following US-American formal models, they often appear as presentations of disparate found materials indifferent to the value hierarchy of the beautiful. This project turns its attention toward this aesthetic of presentation and researches typical forms of representation used in German language Pop literature (“films stills,” “word films,” “audio texts,” “litanies,” “long poems,” “cut-ups,” “paste-ups,” “fold-ins” etc.) and the modes of production (“expanded media,” changes of media, “spontaneous writing,” group work, etc.) of Pop as evasive maneuvers directed toward materials that have been drawn from the ‘trash’ of everyday life: the socio- and psycho-semiotics of everyday life, sexuality, leisure culture, sign and communication systems, the world of commodities, etc.. The objective is to develop criteria out of the specific assignments to ‘poor’ forms and (re-)presented ‘marginal’ material for the sake of an adequate description of intermedial and intercultural texts in which reflections on contemporary possibilities for presenting and effectuating aesthetic experience are immanent. The conceptual considerations and visual symbolic forms of Pop will be described in their perceptual functions as attempts to aesthetically overcome the difficulties emerging from the specific semantics of everyday life (the repeated, the ordinary, the familiar, the pre-existent). The metaphor of ‘trash’ bundles together connotations related to the intentions and procedures of Pop, investigated here as a contribution within modern literature to a poetics of materials and themes which creates an awareness of the ambiguity between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic, simultaneously allowing the semiotics of art to produce a redefinition of aesthetics. On the one hand, the analytical development of the ‘trash’ metaphor is an attempt to describe the texts of Beat and Pop literature based on aesthetic experience of the materials of everyday culture. On the other hand, the intention is to investigate these texts as forms which make possible and which found aesthetic experience and which are capable of transforming the recipient’s access to everyday culture and to the institution of art.
