The Aesthetics of Relations: The Modernist, Contemporary and Post-Contemporary General Conceptualizations of Art

Kaja Kraner

doi:10.25038/am.v0i19.312

Authors

Kaja Kraner

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i19.312

Keywords:

aesthetic education, modernism, autopoiesis, avant-garde aesthetics, dialogical aesthetics, contemporary art, post-contemporary art

Abstract

The article will juxtapose the modernist, contemporary and post-contemporary general conceptualization of art and aesthetic appearance of an artwork. Even though all three conceptualizations can be understood as intertwined because they are largely established in mutual relations, for our purpose they will be analyzed in terms of the basic epistemological terrain on which art enters the Western tradition of knowledge and power: the terrain of aesthetic education. The conceptualization of modernist art/artwork will mainly draw from its link with the autopoietic image of artwork/artistic creativity that can be traced to Romanticism as well as the tradition of the so-called aesthetics of form at the beginning of the 20th century, while conceptualization of contemporary art will be primarily reconstructed on the ground of cultural studies and its reception theory that focused on the analysis of social mediation of cultural texts where the text itself loses the status of an exclusive source of meaning. On the one hand, this article attempts to expose the difference between the two by focusing on conceptualizations of their modes of production of meaning (modernist autopoiesis as producing the artwork’s meaning by, through and of itself versus contextually determined meaning of the artwork within conceptualizations of contemporary art), while on the other, it will expose a general aesthetic appearance of the two based on the differentiation of avant-garde and dialogical aesthetics. From there on, the article will focus on conceptualizations of post-contemporary art in the last ten years that also offered a critique of how contemporary art has been (self)limited to aesthetic experience and by it the present time. In the final part, post-contemporary art will be compared with modernism, for instance in terms of the modernist aim for the transcendent standpoint and its methods of aesthetic alienation in contrast to the post-contemporary aim to eliminate aesthetic experience as such and demonstrate that there can be knowledge without aesthetic experience, or the modernist media research to the post-contemporary media archaeology.

Article received: April 30, 2019; Article accepted: June 23, 2019; Published online: September 15, 2019; Review article

Author Biography

Kaja Kraner

Kaja Kraner
Alma Mater Europaea – Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana
Slovenia

Kaja Kraner is a Ph.D. Candidate of Humanistic Sciences at AMEU-ISH Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is an art critic, producer and curator of contemporary art (Pekarna Magdalenske mreže). Currently, she is an editor of ŠUM, a journal of contemporary art theory and criticism, and editor of the Art-Area broadcast on Radio Študent. She is also a freelance researcher and writer on contemporary art, art theory, aesthetics and cultural politics, as well as a freelance lecturer and curator with Slovenian art institutions and organizations. In her doctoral studies, she is exploring narratives of contemporary art in Slovenia, the relation between the production of knowledge and value within the art field and paradigms of aesthetic education since modernity.

References

Badiou, Alain. “The autonomy of the aesthetic process.” Radical Philosophy 178 (2013): 32–39.

Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon Press, 1965.

Breazeale, Daniel. “Against Art? Fichte on Aesthetic Experiences and Fine Art.” Journal of the Faculty of Letters 38 (2013): 25–42.

Cox, Christoph. “Sonic Thought.” In Realism, Materialism, Art, edited by Christoph Cox et al., 123–30. New York, Berlin: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Sternberg Press, Annandale-on-Hudson, 2015.

Harman, Graham. “Art and OOObjecthood.” In Realism, Materialism, Art, edited by Christoph Cox et al., 97–116. New York, Berlin: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Sternberg Press, Annandale-on-Hudson, 2015.

Kester, Grant, H. Conversation Pieces. Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2004.

Mackay, Robin, Armen Avanessian, ed. #Accelerate. The Accelerationist Reader. Falmouth, Berlin: Urbanomic, 2014.

Malik, Suhail. “Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art.” Realism, Materialism, Art, edited by Christoph Cox et al., 185–92. New York, Berlin: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Sternberg Press, Annandale-on-Hudson, 2015.

Malik, Suhail. “Exit not Escape: On the Necessity of the Arts Exit from Contemporary Art,” lecture on 3/5/2013, Artist space. http://artistsspace.org/programs/on-the-necessity-of-arts-exit-from-contemporary-art. Accessed July 21, 2019.

Osborne, Peter. Anywhere or Not at All. Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London, New York: Verso, 2013.

Pippin, Robert, B. After the Beautiful. Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226079523.001.0001

Schlegel, Friedrich. Spisi o literaturi. Ljubljana: Literarno-umetniško društvo Literatura, 1998.

Shaked, Nizan. The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9781784992750.001.0001

Simoniti, Jure. “Romantična znanstvena revolucija med odpravo reči na sebi in institucijo mesta izjavljanja.” In Izvori romantike, edited by Isaiah Berlin, 181–201. Ljubljana: Krtina, 2012.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i19.312 DOI: https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i19.312