Download or read book Aesthetic Temporalities Today written by Gabriele Genge and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is dedicated to the interrelation between temporality and representation. It presumes that time cannot be conceived of as an abstract chronometric order, but that it is referring to materiality, being measured, represented, expressed, recognized, experienced and evaluated, and therefore is always closely related to cultural contexts of perception and evaluation. The contributions from various disciplines are dedicated to the present and its plural conditions and meanings. They provide insights into the state of research with special emphasis on the global present as well as on art and aesthetics from the 18th century until today. The anthology includes contributions by Mieke Bal, Stefan Binder, Maximilian Bergengruen, Iris Därmann, Gabriele Genge, Boris Roman Gibhardt, Boris Groys, Maria Muhle, Johannes F. Lehmann, Nkiru Nzegwu, Francesca Raimondi, Christine Ross, Ludger Schwarte, Angela Stercken, Samuel Strehle, Timm Trausch, Patrick Stoffel, and Christina Wessely.

Download or read book What Are Aesthetic Temporalities written by Michael Gamper and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Modern Times written by Jacques Ranciere and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The critique of modernist ideology from France's leading radical theorist In this book Jacques Rancière radicalises his critique of modernism and its postmodern appendix. He contrasts their unilinear and exclusive time with the interweaving of temporalities at play in modern processes of emancipation and artistic revolutions, showing how this plurality itself refers to the double dimension of time. Time is more than a line drawn from the past to the future. It is a form of life, marked by the ancient hierarchy between those who have time and those who do not. This hierarchy, continued in the Marxist notion of the vanguard and nakedly exhibited in Clement Greenberg’s modernism, still governs a present which clings to the fable of historical necessity and its experts. In opposition to this, Rancière shows how the break with the hierarchical conception of time, formulated by Emerson in his vision of the new poet, implies a completely different idea of the modern. He sees the fulfilment of this in the two arts of movement, cinema and dance, which at the beginning of the twentieth century abolished the opposition between free and mechanical people, at the price of exposing the rift between the revolution of artists and that of strategists.

Download or read book On Slowness written by Lutz Koepnick and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speed is an obvious facet of contemporary society, whereas slowness has often been dismissed as conservative and antimodern. Challenging a long tradition of thought, Lutz Koepnick instead proposes we understand slowness as a strategy of the contemporary—a decidedly modern practice that gazes firmly at and into the present's velocity. As he engages with late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art, photography, video, film, and literature, Koepnick explores slowness as a critical medium to intensify our temporal and spatial experiences. Slowness helps us register the multiple layers of time, history, and motion that constitute our present. It offers a timely (and untimely) mode of aesthetic perception and representation that emphasizes the openness of the future and undermines any conception of the present as a mere replay of the past. Discussing the photography and art of Janet Cardiff, Olafur Eliasson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Michael Wesely; the films of Peter Weir and Tom Tykwer; the video installations of Douglas Gordon, Willie Doherty, and Bill Viola; and the fiction of Don DeLillo, Koepnick shows how slowness can carve out spaces within processes of acceleration that allow us to reflect on alternate temporalities and durations.

Download or read book Sensibility and Sense written by Arnold Berleant and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2011-11-28 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aesthetic sensibility rests on perceptual experience and characterizes not only our experience of the arts but our experience of the world. Sensibility and Sense offers a philosophically comprehensive account of humans' social and cultural embeddedness encountered, recognized, and fulfilled as an aesthetic mode of experience. Extending the range of aesthetic experience from the stone of the earth's surface to the celestial sphere, the book focuses on the aesthetic as a dimension of social experience. The guiding idea of pervasive interconnectedness, both social and environmental, leads to an aesthetic critique of the urban environment, the environment of daily life, and of terrorism, and has profound implications for grounding social and political values. The aesthetic emerges as a powerful critical tool for appraising urban culture and political practice.

Download or read book From Time to Totality written by Brian Thomas Clancy and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation constructs a philosophy of perception that creates what I call a “perceptive ontology of objects.” This ontology emphasizes, not the subjective perspectivalism of human identity, but the dynamic emergence of objects into objecthood through impersonal modalities of space, time, light, and sound. Objecthood is an attempt to render perceptive experience as something neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective. Here objects are connected with subjectivity and yet still external. I argue that modernist authors present changeable, novelistic surfaces, which submit the novel’s material objects to epistemological doubt. This creates radically interruptive moments of heightened perception, rupturing immediate experience from the more conventionally mimetic, referential, and social surfaces of the novel found within literary realism. These perceptive experiences create representational effects which I call “the mimesis of sensation.” This creates a sensory surface in the story world through which the reader aligns with the perceptive experiences of characters. This form of readerly connection is distinct from either Aristotelian empathy on the one hand, or Brechtian estrangement, on the other. In what I call, following Woolf, “the moment,” a temporality distinct from the present, the modernist works of authors like Mallarmé, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka foreground perception itself, altering visions of time to construct discrete and static temporalities. These discontinuous moments create forms of abstract continuity. They thus create a dialectical relationship with narrative. These event-like ruptures, occurring through encounters with the surface of objects, offer two distinct notions of time that could serve as alternatives to the post-structuralist critique of the materiality of the signifier as seen in theorists like Derrida and Barthes. First, the surface of the text becomes an expansive medium of perception: a collection of perpetual gestures, interruptions, reflections, and possibilities which arises, not through linguistic play, but through a composite surface of language and perception. Secondly, a totality emerges through perceptive processes in relation to this medium, not through the infinite deferral of the signified, but through the ongoing logical recession of the object through epistemological immanence. Here I also take an important departure from the work of other theorists of modernity—Baudelaire, Bergson, Benjamin, and Deleuze, and others—who suggest an imagistic immediacy to the experience of non-chronological time. My notion of the modernist literary object is distinctively not a ready-to-point-to image. I critique the centrality of images in 20th-century theories of temporality, arguing that modernism constructs moments of readerly critical alignment not through the satisfaction of visual desire, but by foregrounding processes of apprehension, perception, and inquiry: attempting to decipher an object which is never quite fully known. Even as the modernist techniques I study draw attention to the artifice of representation and the difficulties of constructing knowledge, they also frame objects of perception, constructing scenes of aesthetic totality—available to the spectator so long as she acknowledges the mediated lens through which she looks. I see totality as the possibility that perception could be made whole, the possibility that there is a form of subjectless experience in which perceptive inquiry creates order (as forms of abstract continuity). These totalities, perceivable not in chronologies of external perceptible phenomena, but within impersonal faculties of apprehension, as they coincide with these forms of deeper time, also invoke pathos (through the acknowledgment of dimensions of fate). In four chapters, each devoted to a respective modernist author, the project shows how the works of Mallarmé, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka reveal relationships between what I call modernism’s “moments” and the receding totality of the object. Chapter 1 of the dissertation argues that a relationship exists between Mallarmé’s reception of impressionism and the poet’s linguistic theory. Here I examine Mallarmé’s writings on the impressionist plein air technique in his essay, “The Impressionists and Édouard Manet” (1876). Plein air means more for Mallarmé than just painting outdoors. Air, in Mallarmé’s eyes, is a full presence. Atmosphere is the key to a deep and abstract form of naturalism in his work. Other subjects in this chapter include atmospheric modalities like breath or respiration, speech and the sounds of words, or aspects of nature like weather. In Chapter 2, the novelistic objects of perceptive ontology in Woolfian impressionism create a temporal rupture from realism’s more conventional referential representation. I argue that Woolf creates another type of realism through her experiments with time. Importantly, I break from the work of 20th-century continental theorists of radical time influenced by Bergson (like Deleuze) in which the image plays a central, functional role. Woolf’s moments challenge the idea of a Bergsonian image-form not subject to doubt in order to open the imaginative field of literature to what I call “the mimesis of sensation.” This sensible time is not a form of eternity, it is a form of “living in time” (Elizabeth Abel’s phrase). A sense of reality lies in the atmospheric diffusion of Woolf’s unfinished marks of time (my phrase) such as the floating “airs” Woolf mentions in To The Lighthouse. Chapter 3 begins with a look at Joyce's notions of the “ineluctable modality of the visible” and the “ineluctable modality of the audible” from Chapter 3 (Proteus) of Ulysses. I define the ineluctable as that which overwhelms the cognitive work of Joyce’s characters. I argue that in Joyce’s work, visual modalities, for the most part, do not correspond to the ineluctable. I argue, sound does. I demonstrate that Joycean sound displays a certain tragic character which is moreover, non-anthropocentric. Sound thus seems to exceed the human point of view. Joycean sound thus surpasses narratological elements which take affect and the human lifespan as points of departure. I argue that the uncanny laughter in Joyce’s Sirens dismantles omniscience and anthropomorphic tragic surveillance (the assumption that the story world can be viewed by the all-seeing gaze of divine figuration). The fourth and final chapter of the dissertation argues that in Kafka’s The Trial epistemological operations bring about the gradual dawning of objects. Here I characterize an object as “dawning” because its state of emergence seems posited for a reader. In a challenge to critics like Adorno, Lukács, and more recently J. Hillis Miller, who see Kafka’s work as impenetrable to the spectator’s view of phenomena, I argue that in The Trial, Kafka’s representational effects reside in the protagonist’s sensory apprehension. The reader then aligns with this mimesis of the character’s perceptual experience.

Download or read book Time Images written by Tyrus Miller and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-07-13 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of “time-image,” this book argues, holds broad potential for the historical interpretation of cultural and aesthetic works. Many works that would not ordinarily be thought to be historical artifacts reveal their intrinsic historical character in light of this innovative interpretative concept. The book’s first section,“Time-Images as Theory and Historiography,” considers alternative temporalities underlying historicizing theories and specific practices of history. Examples treated here include the notion of “retro-avantgardism,” works by the Frankfurt School on the interrelations of images and history, and Mass Observation’s dream documentation project. The second section, “Time-Images in Modernist and Postmodernist Literature,” considers literary instances in which alternative notions of historical time are engaged. These include discussions of Wyndham Lewis and “cultural revolution,” Theodor Adorno’s reading of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s use of Antonio Gramsci in the practice of poetry and philology. The third section, “Moving Images of Time,” discusses questions of cinema including children’s experience in films depicting traumatic historical events, the Quay Brothers’ animated adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s “Street of Crocodiles,” and Sergei Eisenstein’s and Charles Olson’s engagements in Mexico with pictographic representation, etymology, and archeological time.

Download or read book Situating Global Art written by Sarah Dornhof and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the term global art has become a catchphrase in contemporary art discourses. Going beyond additive notions of canon expansion, this volume encourages a differentiated inquiry into the complex aesthetic, cultural, historical, political, epistemological and socio-economic implications of both the term global art itself and the practices it subsumes. Focusing on diverse examples of art, curating, historiography and criticism, the contributions not only take into account (new) hegemonies and exclusions but also the shifting conditions of transcultural art production, circulation and reception.

Download or read book Transitional Aesthetics written by Uroš Cvoro and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-05-17 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the way in which artists from the former Eastern bloc perceive the experience of EU integration and transition from a Soviet past as a conceptual launching pad, this book explores how artists critically inhabit a permanent state of 'in-between' to capture the simultaneous existence of multiple and overlapping temporalities. Transitional aesthetics are artistic strategies that disrupt and interrogate ideologically loaded trajectories of cultural, social, or political transition. Examples of such trajectories include the movement from totalitarianism to democracy (post-socialism), from war to freedom and reconciliation (post-conflict), and from the edges of Europe to its centre (inclusion in the European Union). These transitional states include: the future orientation of (failed) socialism and the perpetual present of global capital; the history of unresolved past conflicts and reconciliation through 'transitional justice'; nationalist obsessions with the past and the cultural appeal of kitsch and retro objects in fashion, film and music; and the uncertain future promise of EU membership and resurgence of global right-wing populism, headed by figures like Berlusconi, Le Pen, and Trump. Transitional Aesthetics shows that apprehending time in contemporary art is fundamental to capturing the lived experience of a permanent state of instability; particularly relevant to Europe in the contemporary moment. In a world that has entered 'accelerated transition' towards instability, understanding this experience has broad and resonating relevance for politics, art and society.

Download or read book Beautiful Bright and Blinding written by H. Peter Steeves and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2017-10-27 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Phenomenological analysis of beauty and art across various aspects of lived experience and culture. Through a careful analysis of concrete examples taken from everyday experience and culture, Beautiful, Bright, and Blinding develops a straightforward and powerful aesthetic methodology founded on a phenomenological approach to experience—one that investigates how consciousness engages with the world and thus what it means to take such things as tastes, images, sounds, and even a life itself as art. H. Peter Steeves begins by exploring what it means to see, and considers how disruptions of sight can help us rethink how perception works. Engaging the work of Derrida, Heidegger, and Husserl, he uses these insights about “seeing” to undertake a systematic phenomenological investigation of how we perceive and process a range of aesthetic objects, including the paintings of Arshile Gorky, the films of Michael Haneke, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, zombie films, The Simpsons, the performance art of Rachel Rosenthal and Andy Kaufman, and even vegan hot dogs. Refusing hierarchical distinctions between high and low art, Steeves argues that we must conceptualize the whole of human experience as aesthetic: art is lived, and living is an art. “This is a brilliant new contribution by our preeminent phenomenologist of culture. It’s extremely accessible, illuminating, original, and sophisticated while being philosophically probing.” — David Wood, author of The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction

Download or read book Uncommon Sense written by Craig Leonard and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-09-27 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of Herbert Marcuse’s political claim for the aesthetic dimension, focusing on defamiliarization as a means of developing radical sensibility. In Uncommon Sense, Craig Leonard argues for the contemporary relevance of the aesthetic theory of Herbert Marcuse—an original member of the Frankfurt School and icon of the New Left—while also acknowledging his philosophical limits. His account reinvigorates Marcuse for contemporary readers, putting his aesthetic theory into dialogue with antiracist and anti-capitalist activism. Leonard emphasizes several key terms not previously analyzed within Marcuse’s aesthetics, including defamiliarization, anti-art, and habit. In particular, he focuses on the centrality of defamiliarization—a subversion of common sense that can be a means to the development of what Marcuse refers to as “radical sensibility.” Leonard brings forward Marcuse’s claim that the aesthetic dimension is political because of its refusal to operate according to the repressive common sense that establishes and maintains relationships dictated by advanced capitalism. For Marcuse, defamiliarization is at the center of the aesthetic dimension, offering the direct means of stimulating its political potential. Leonard expands upon Marcuse’s aesthetics by drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter, going beyond Marcuse’s predominantly European and patrilineal intellectual framework—while still retaining his aesthetic theory’s fundamental characteristics—toward a human dimension requiring decolonial, feminist, antiracist, and counterpoetic perspectives.

Download or read book The Aesthetics of Necropolitics written by Natasha Lushetich and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collection comprises contributions from leading artist-theorists in the fields of necropolitics and tactical media, and from increasingly influential scholars of biomediality and urban performativity

Download or read book Identity Aesthetics and Sound in the Fin de Si cle written by Dariusz Gafijczuk and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an analytic and historical portrait of the volatile decades at the beginning of the 20th century. Engaging with avant-garde art and thought, and concentrating on two of the most controversial and still culturally relevant personalities of Viennese modernism - Sigmund Freud and Arnold Schoenberg - it tells the story of a cultural experiment of unprecedented proportions, an experiment that attempted to redesign the senses and the concept of individual identity. The book describes the shape of this identity through its mutually overlapping artistic and intellectual dimensions, as it explores the relationship between psychoanalysis and music.

Download or read book Afterness written by Gerhard Richter and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gerhard Richter's groundbreaking study argues that the concept of "afterness" is a key figure in the thought and aesthetics of modernity. It pursues questions such as: What does it mean for something to "follow" something else? Does that which follows mark a clear break with what came before it, or does it in fact tacitly perpetuate its predecessor as a consequence of its inevitable indebtedness to the terms and conditions of that from which it claims to have departed? Indeed, is not the very act of breaking with, and then following upon, a way of retroactively constructing and fortifying that from which the break that set the movement of following into motion had occurred? The book explores the concept and movement of afterness as a privileged yet uncanny category through close readings of writers such as Kant, Kafka, Heidegger, Bloch, Benjamin, Brecht, Adorno, Arendt, Lyotard, and Derrida. It shows how the vexed concepts of afterness, following, and coming after shed new light on a constellation of modern preoccupations, including personal and cultural memory, translation, photography, hope, and the historical and conceptual specificity of what has been termed "after Auschwitz." The study's various analyses across a heterogeneous collection of modern writers and thinkers, diverse historical moments of articulation, and a range of media conspire to illuminate Lyotard's apodictic statement that "after philosophy comes philosophy. But it has been altered by the 'after.'" As Richter's intricate study demonstrates, much hinges on our interpretation of the "after." After all, our most fundamental assumptions concerning modern aesthetic representation, conceptual discourse, community, subjectivity, and politics are at stake.

Download or read book Henry David Thoreau s Aesthetics written by Verena Kerting and published by Peter Lang Publishing. This book was released on 2006 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of the analysis is to show how Thoreau anticipated modern, 20th century notions of world and art. Following a summary of Baumgarten's, Leibniz', Descartes' and Kant's aesthetic theories five basic aesthetic questions are formulated. A close reading of Walden and the Journal answers these questions in regard to Thoreau's artistic approach. The close reading documents his life-long struggle for an adequate perception of the phenomena that - made his world. To Thoreau even the most trivial thing expressed its divine character through its specific beauty. The last two chapters of the analysis reveal the connections that exist between Thoreau's aesthetics of the trivial and 20th century aesthetics, between his notion of nature as expression and recent biosemiotic theory."

Download or read book European Aesthetics written by Robert Wicks and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only book to cover the evolution of one of the most important areas of philosophy The birth of the Enlightenment heralded a new reverence for the power of reason. But as science flourished in Europe, violence and brutality did not abate. In the French Revolution, thousands were guillotined and the death toll was vast. Philosophers asked whether we had become dehumanised by rationality and abstract political theory. Did art and literature provide a way to rediscover our soul and our compassion? Or could art be corrupted just as easily, used as propaganda to justify abhorrent acts? In this masterful survey of European aesthetics over the last two hundred years, philosopher Robert L. Wicks argues that it is this tension between creativity and rationality that has characterised debate in the subject. Presenting the theories of sixteen seminal thinkers, including Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, and Derrida, European Aesthetics shows how each philosopher’s theory of art was motivated by broader topics in their thought, concerning who we are and what a good society should resemble. With colour photographs and written in a lively but objective tone, Wicks analyses important pieces of art, makes critical comparisons between thinkers, and offers a bold conclusion on our contemporary aesthetic situation. In an internet age, where we are presented with endless opportunity, but also startling existential questions, this is the definitive account of the evolution of continental thought in this hugely relevant and exciting area of philosophy.

Download or read book War and Aesthetics written by Jens Bjering and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-06-18 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative edited collection that takes an original approach toward the black box of military technology, surveillance, and AI—and reveals the aesthetic dimension of warfare. War and Aesthetics gathers leading artists, political scientists, and scholars to outline the aesthetic dimension of warfare and offer a novel perspective on its contemporary character and the construction of its potential futures. Edited by a team of four scholars, Jens Bjering, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Solveig Gade, and Christine Strandmose Toft, this timely volume examines warfare through the lens of aesthetics, arguing that the aesthetic configurations of perception, technology, and time are central to the artistic engagement with warfare, just as they are key to military AI, weaponry, and satellite surveillance. People mostly think of war as the violent manifestation of a political rationality. But when war is viewed through the lens of aesthesis—meaning perception and sensibility—military technology becomes an applied science of sensory cognition. An outgrowth of three war seminars that took place in Copenhagen between 2018 and 2021, War and Aesthetics engages in three main areas of inquiry—the rethinking of aesthetics in the field of art and in the military sphere; the exploration of techno-aesthetics and the wider political and theoretical implications of war technology; and finally, the analysis of future temporalities that these technologies produce. The editors gather various traditions and perspectives ranging from literature to media studies to international relations, creating a unique historical and scientific approach that broadly traces the entanglement of war and aesthetics across the arts, social sciences, and humanities from ancient times to the present. As international conflict looms between superpowers, War and Aesthetics presents new and illuminating ways to think about future conflict in a world where violence is only ever a few steps away. Contributors Louise Amoore, Ryan Bishop, Jens Bjering, James Der Derian, Anthony Downey, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Solveig Gade, Mark B. Hansen, Caroline Holmqvist, Vivienne Jabri, Caren Kaplan, Phil Klay, Kate McLoughlin, Elaine Scarry, Christine Strandmose Toft, Joseph Vogl, Arkadi Zaides