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William Kentridge: Zeichnung für Black Box /Chambre
Noire, Kohle auf Collage aus gefundenem Papier, 2005
Head
Research Associates
Dr. Karin Gludovatz / Dr. Dorothea von Hantelmann / Dr. Susanne Leeb
Student Assistants
Objective
Research Project A7 examines the forms of the dissolution of limits in contemporary art from an art-historical and art-theoretical perspective. At the center of interest stands the thesis that the categories of the dissolution of limits can no longer be conceived as being based on the emphatic demand for the liberation of art from its supposed autonomy and its access to spheres previously foreign to art such as politics, science and economics (i.e., as in the cases of the avant-gardes and the neo-avant-gardes). Instead, such categories reside already in a constitutive ferment that present in the works of art themselves, where they become productive as a particular quality of experience. With this change as our point of departure, the question is posed of how such an immanent dissolution of limits is realized in specific art forms: first of all, in the concrete materiality and mediality of the work of art, secondly with respect to the relationship of art to other social spheres, including those of politics, religion and knowledge.
The project inquires after the status and the characteristics of this productivity of dissolution, and after notions of the social and political effectivity of art that are associated with it. It further investigates the development of this notion in the processes of production and reception that are recognized as being crucial in the works themselves, and which are formally and semantically reflected and rendered discursive. This question will be investigated on the basis of three central fields of operation of contemporary art: that of interpictoriality, cartography and situativity.
Subproject 1: In Layers. Archaeologies of the Image in Contemporary Art
(Dr. Karin Gludovatz and Prof. Dr. Klaus Krüger)
The first subproject investigates the dissolution of limits as a phenomenon of immanent layering, interweaving and interpenetration in images and concepts of images in contemporary art. The films of William Kentridge, for instance, which deal primarily with the history and the consequences of the Shoah and of the South African Apartheid regime, were produced in the genuine sense as palimpsests. Productive-aesthetic layering procedures are also observable in recent approaches to contemporary history painting. On the one hand, this subproject explores structures of meaning that are internal to works of art, that is to say, the extent to which a work of art is constituted not only by the layering of various pictorial motifs, but also by various visual discourses, and how it thereby establishes a structure of layering, of multiple superposition and of reciprocal transparency vis-à-vis the ‘images’ of the past and those of the present. On the other hand, the project also explores structures of meaning that are external to the work, but nonetheless assumes that the distinguishing feature of intermedial procedures and inter-pictorial references also affects the reception of a given work, and is capable simultaneously of opening up this pictorially-layered quality, this oscillation between actuality and staging, artificiality and life, as a model of the formation of human experience.
Subproject 2: Cartographic Models in Contemporary Art
(Dr. Susanne Leeb)
Beginning in the 1950s, the map as a pictorial form and medium of information, as well as cartography as an aesthetic and histological praxis, has undergone a process of artistic re-appropriation, and has been theorized under the concept of mapping. This theoretical rediscovery begins with the redefinition of maps as models for forms of behavior, and as capable of disclosing new modes of experience, as programmatically formulated by the Situationists. Maps and cartographic procedures are particularly interesting for artistic approaches because they relate primarily to political and social relationships. Currently, this means questions about globalization, economicization, migration and territorial authority. In this project, the modes of reference operative in these fields will be investigated and discussed. Among other issues, we will examine the field of tension lying between a realism of information and the fictional and imaginary dimensions of procedures of image production.
Subproject 3: Exemplary Experiences.
Relations between Work and Situation in Contemporary Art
(Dr. Dorothea von Hantelmann)
The third subproject investigates the dissolution of limits in the artwork all the way to the situation, the spatial, temporal, discursive dispositive, determined by convention, in which the work of art is presented, perceived and experienced. The objective is to elaborate a concept of the work that is capable of grasping those immanent movements between work and situation so characteristic of many works of contemporary art. The works of artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Carsten Höller and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster are distinguished by a structure in which the situative realization of the work is a function of the perpetually self-replenishing actions and experiences of beholders which have been incorporated and shaped within its conception. The question of how artistic ‘situations’ are constituted leads unavoidably to the reciprocal relationships between artistic praxis and everyday life. Explored on the basis of examples from contemporary art will be the interrelationships between work, location, and beholder, between aesthetic and non-aesthetic levels of experience; in the process, concepts of functionality, shaping, and semanticization of experience will be elaborated.
