SITE 11has just arrived!Content as follows:
Builders and Warriors. Military Operations as Urban Planning by Eyal Weizman / The Ideology of The West Wing: The TV Show that Wants to Be Real by Kristina Riegert / ”Black Mountain College – “An eye-opener” by Håkan Nilsson / Fact and fictions. A conversation with Bernie Kirschenbaum and Susan Weil by Helena Mattsson / ”The Light Inferno of the Heart” by Miriam Acuna / Like a lizard by Carl Michael von Hausswolff / Ernesto learns to read by Kim West / Figures in A Landscape by Trond Lundemo / Gabriel Lester Some things are better left unexplained 2004 / The Limits of Aesthetics: Kant and Contemporary Art by Sven-Olov Wallenstein / Symbolizing Permanent Desire: Kant’s Aesthetic Judgement and Duchamp’s “Painting of Precision” by Andrea Esser / Kant/Adorno and the Dynamics of Artistic Appearing by Martin Seel / Kant’s “Free play…”in Light of Minimal Art by Thierry de Duve / An Archive of Pleasure: Kantian Aesthetics and the Public Museum by Jennifer Allen
This issue was produced with the support of, and in co-operation with
Limits of Aesthetics, Kant and Contemporary Art.
A seminar held at Moderna Museet in co-operation with Goethe-Institute Stockholm
In the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant concludes the project of establishing a “critical philosophy,” a project that began with the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Critique of Practical Reason (1788). In these three works, he delineates a conceptual structure that separates the cognitive from the ethical and the aesthetic. Thus commences the fundamentally divided character of modern thought. But the concept of aesthetics proposed in the Third Critique is deeply ambivalent: on the one hand, art and aesthetics are posed as separate spheres. On the other hand, they are a profound articulation, a “bridge” connecting the twin strands of freedom and nature. Aesthetic modernity constantly wrestles with this split Kantian heritage.
One reading of the Third Critique has emphasized autonomy, and has become the implicit foundation for most modern formalisms, for the idea of the poem as “verbal icon,” and the image as “significant form,” and so on. On the other hand, Kant’s successors in the Romantic generation – from Schiller, Hölderlin, and onwards – all attempt to transcend the “Kantian limit,” as Hölderlin calls it, often by seeing the artwork as an absolute unity, as an “intellectual intuition,” imbued with the capability of disclosing the world in a fundamentally new way.
This line of thought can be traced from Romanticism through to Adorno and Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Lyotard, and views the work as a site for the advent of truth, in such a way that both presupposes and undermines the idea of autonomy. The significance of Kant’s aesthetic for contemporary artistic and theoretical work is indeed a matter of debate. For some, the concept of autonomy seems outdated in the postmodern age, where art transgresses the limits of the aesthetic in order to engage in the political and the social. For others, this limit cannot be so easily transcended – in fact, what a certain modernity does, “after Duchamp,” could be to return to the initial problems of Kant by highlighting their antinomies and paradoxes.
The symposium, “The Limits of Aesthetics: Kant and Contemporary Art,” brings together four different perspectives, all of which provide a different take on Kant’s relevance for the contemporary situation.
Speakers: Andrea Esser, Martin Seel, Thierry de Duve, Jennifer Allen, Sven-Olov Wallenstein.
Site indicates a kind of indeterminacy, which perhaps is what characterizes the contemporary moment more than anything else -- an indeterminacy concerning the relations among the arts and their respective borders; concerning the relation among art, philosophy, and politics; concerning the very sense of what we persist in calling "tradition." Site is a place and a space yet to be determined -- the site can also be a non-site, concepts which pass over into each other, as Robert Smithson once contended. And what precisely are our modern spaces and sites -- zones of transit, passage, relay? To this, the "sites" of electronic space add yet another dimension, and what it is that actually constitutes the "site" of the work, of action, and of expression seems more uncertain than ever before.
The Editors
Site
Åsögatan 176, 6tr
116 32 Stockholm
[email protected]
Sven-Olov Wallenstein
Brian Manning Delaney
Power Ekroth
Carsten Höller
Trond Lundemo
Staffan Lundgren
Helena Mattsson
Meike Schalk
Kim West
David Elliott
Erik van der Heeg
Carl-Fredrik Hårleman
Ivo Nilsson
Lars Mikael Raattamaa
Fredrika Spindler
Netherlands
Artimo A-Z
Norway
Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo
Museet for Samtidskunst, Oslo
Germany
Bücherbogen, Savignyplatz, Berlin
Pro Qm, Berlin
Sweden
Uppsala Konstmuseum
Index
Malmö Konsthall
Moderna Museets boklåda
Konst-ig
Hedengrens
Tidskriftsbutiken, Malmö
Turkey
BOOKSTR, Istanbul
U.S.A.
Printed Matter, NY