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Groundplan groundfloor, Jewish Museum Berlin.
Daniel Libeskind
Head
Research Associates
Tabea Metzel, M.A. / Dr. Dorothea von Hantelmann / Dr. des. Susanne Leeb
Student Assistants
Objective
Our research project proceeds from the assumption that dissolution in contemporary art is no longer an overriding or an abolition of art – as was the case with the avant-gardes – but has itself become a constitutive principle for the production and experience of art. In this sense we speak of the paradoxical phenomenon of immanent dissolution, by which the outward reference is an integral aspect of a work of art.In the third funding period we are examining the extent to which this principle of immanent dissolution modifies contemporary art’s reference to society, in particular its critical aspirations and forms of judgement. For in as much as immanence implies one’s own involvement in the phenomena under criticism, it initially calls into question the distanced viewpoint as a precondition for criticism. Against current claims as to the impossibility or invalidity of criticism under conditions of dissolution, our research project assumes that the concept of criticism should not be abandoned, but its procedures and forms of judgement should be redefined. An examination is accordingly made of the ways through which art asserts its right to criticism and the new forms of criticism this gives rise to. We proceed from three issues that have a central significance to present-day art production and which each determine the research field of a sub-project: a) the irreducibility of mediality, b) the discourse of modernism and c) the institutional context. In these areas we look into the ways through which art tests its ability to criticise and thus establishes its relationship to society.
Subproject 1: Post-memory and fictionalisation. Aesthetic witness in contemporary art
(Prof. Dr. Klaus Krüger and Tabea Metzel)
This research project proceeds from the currently occurring generational change and concomitant loss of direct witnesses which is leading to variations in the aesthetic portrayal and narration of the Holocaust. The project focuses on the change in direction towards narrativisation and fictionalisation within the ‘post-memorial’ forms of reference to the past that can be observed in numerous artistic positions dealing with memory, witness and strategies of authentication in respect of mass-media portrayal (e.g. Omer Fast), or that circumvent the representational conventions of the Holocaust and question the concepts of authenticity and the aesthetic or ethical categories of judgement associated with them (e.g. Art Spiegelman or Alan Schechner). Among other things the research concerns the extent to which the reflective potential of such artistic positions are productive in relation to the dilemma – notorious since Adorno – that any artistic depiction of the Holocaust tends towards reconciliation with or redemption from the occurrence. Against this background, and in a widening of Geoffrey Hartmann’s concept of the intellectual witness, an inquiry is undertaken into the ethical relevance of aesthetic witness that attempts to undermine its axiological secondariness by constructing mediatisation and fictionalisation as a dimension of the past itself, thus countering the both elusiveness of history and its own claim to validity with the logic of immanence.
Subproject 2: Abstraction and the critique of modernism in contemporary art
(Dr. des. Susanne Leeb)
Many approaches can be found in contemporary art which criticise the abstract and abstracting visual languages of modernism and the violence of its claim to universal (primarily meaning European) validity – and themselves have recourse to abstract or semi-abstract visual languages. Kobena Mercer’s theory of an African, diasporic, ‘impure’, ‘discrepant’ abstraction of the 1940s/50s serves here as a heuristic model to inquire into the consequences of this modernist abstraction and how it subjectivates. The research project analyses the work of such artists who appropriate abstracting visual languages of the avant-gardes (e.g. Nasreen Mohamedi) and partially re-embody them (e.g. Tamar Getter), take up abstracting procedures for reasons of economic criticism (e.g. Fareed Armaly), combine them with other media such as film or photography (e.g. Florian Pumhösl) or develop a form of relational abstraction on the basis of diagrammatic procedures (e.g. Ricardo Basbaum). The connection between universality and abstraction is newly configured in these artworks.
