This paper is concerned with the aesthetic and discursive gap between music and contemporary art, and the recent attempts to remedy this in the field of New Music through a notion of “New Conceptualism.” It examines why, despite musical sources being central to the emergence of conceptual artistic strategies in the 1950s and ’60s, the worlds of an increasingly transmedial “generic art” and music have remained largely distinct. While it takes New Music’s New Conceptualism as its focus, it argues that (...) the perspective on New Music it takes has wider implications in music and art. It begins by defining what exactly “New Music” refers to, and outlines some of the conditions for the recent rise of conceptualism in New Music. It then takes the work of the composer Johannes Kreidler as a key example of some artistic tendencies and theoretical presuppositions in New Conceptualism. Following this it draws on work in the field of sound studies in order to critically examine the theoretical attempt to connect New Music with contemporary art that is found in the notion of “Music in the Expanded Field.” To conclude it offers some reflections on how a more robust conversation between contemporary art and New Music can begin to be conceived. (shrink)

Art is a creative phenomenon which changes constantly, not just insofar as it is being created continually, but also in the very meaning of ‘art.’ Finding a suitable definition of art is no easy task and it has been the subject of much inquiry throughout artistic expression. This paper suggests a crucial distinction between ‘art forms’ and ‘forms of art’ is necessary in order to better understand art. The latter of these corresponds to that which we would typically call art (...) such as painting, singing, etc. The former corresponds to the form out of which these take shape, movement, speech, etc. With this distinction set out, it becomes clearer that art and the aesthetic is rooted in the properties of the ‘thing’ such as the color, shape, and the texture, rather than the product of creation itself. Thus, the future of art will bring a new aesthetic in which these properties become recognized as art and as such there will be an aesthetic of everyday life. (shrink)

This piece reconstructs and reflects upon the terms of the theoretical projection underlying Max Tomba’s book,Marx’s Temporalities, with particular reference to his use of the concepts of multiple temporalities and temporal layers. Tomba’s use of these concepts, it is argued, productively relocates Marx’s writings within the framework of the twentieth-century philosophy of time. However, Tomba’s dependence upon received versions of these concepts, untransformed, reproduces theoretical problems implicit within them, which have been intensified by recent developments within global capital. The application (...) of these concepts to an understanding of the historical present, understood as a situation of globally disjunctive contemporaneity, is seen to be, in part, vitiated by their embeddedness within an increasingly exhausted past. (shrink)

From the late 1960s until his death in 2014, the filmmaker and artist Harun Farocki repeatedly returned in his work to the subject of labour. This article examines a selection of Farocki’s films and video installations, delineating his recurrent chronicling of the historical trajectory of the labour process and technological development under capitalist industrialisation. In particular, it focuses on Farocki’s sustained investigation into capitalism’s drive to systematically displace forms of skilled craft from the production process by subordinating both manual and (...) intellectual labour to an incremental process of deskilling and mechanisation, as well as his interrogation of the implication of various instrumental and automated visual technologies in such processes. In doing so, I underline the continuing significance of Marxist theory for analysing Farocki’s critical portrayal of capitalist modernity as dominated by an abstract and alienated historical dynamic toward the increasing rationalisation and control of production and social life. (shrink)

У статті проаналізовано концепції мистецького авангарду Петера Бюрґера, Бориса Гройса та Пітера Осборна на предмет виявлення зв’язку між філософською критикою авангарду та обґрунтуванням його історичного статусу. Ці три погляди збігаються щодо предмета, але відмінні у підходах до його трактування. Аналіз та порівняння цих поглядів дають нам змогу простежити зв’язок теорій авангарду, розроблених у працях цих дослідників, з їхнім баченням історії мистецтва. При цьому враховуватиметься як контекст появи та існування окремих історичних напрямів, так і їхній зв’язок із сьогоденням. Шляхом експлікації та (...) порівняння теоретичних підходів було встановлено, що всі три концепції визнають ключове значення концепції інституції мистецтва для рефлексії та саморефлексії авангарду. Особливе місце відведено питанню «автономності» мистецтва та його включеності у соціальні та політичні процеси через інституційність мистецтва, яка визначає статус художника та специфічність прочитання творів. Також приділено увагу змінам соціальної ролі авангарду, як подоланню «автономності» та функціонуванню в безпосередній близькості до суспільної «життєвої» сфери. Проаналізовано темпоральну самостійність авангарду щодо темпоральних режимів модерну та сучасності, як можливість подолання історицистських схем вписування авангарду до історії мистецтва та його розгляду в умовах темпоральної та історичної самостійності. (shrink)

Thirty years on from the publication of Chaosmosis, Guattari’s words invite an evaluation: ‘The aesthetic power of feeling seems on the verge of occupying a privileged position within the collective Assemblages of enunciation of our era.’ While this privilege can be seen today in the realms of social networks, mass media and populist politics, its place in contemporary artistic practices is more ambiguous. Guattari is careful to separate ‘aesthetic power‘ from ‘institutional art’, but the ontology of Chaosmosis nevertheless seems to (...) find its model in the artistic avant-garde, and artistic affects and percepts are its privileged and recurring examples. Tracing the path of Guattari’s prophecy through the last thirty years of contemporary art involves two distinct approaches: first, to analyse Guattari’s reading of Duchamp, and to follow its trajectory through a generation of thinkers who utilised Guattari’s approach to art, most notably Nicolas Bourriaud, Franco Berardi (Bifo), Maurizio Lazzarato and Eric Alliez; second, to confront Guattari’s prophecy with the post-conceptual modes of art that now appear hegemonic, and that would seem to deny its efficacy. This we might say, is to approach our problem twice – once philosophically, and again from the point of view of contemporary art. As we shall see, these approaches lead in quite different directions. (shrink)

Intermedial art, as it emerged in the 1960s and 70s, constituted a threat not only to the medium specificity of modernism, but to the artwork as self-contained autonomous object. Both supporters and critics of intermedia drew a contrast between, on the one hand, modernism’s aesthetic engagement with a medium-specific ‘object’, and on the other new non-aesthetic ‘practices’ engaging the ‘literal spectator’ within her own space, such that the space of the gallery is drawn into the situational encounter. In her 2003/12 (...) book Aesthetics of Installation Art Juliana Rebentisch challenges this binary characterization of autonomous/non-autonomous art. She argues that aesthetic autonomy is not something that can be guaranteed by production, but rather is explicable only with reference to the structure of the aesthetic experience. And for Rebentisch, while installation art has not led to fundamentally different conditions of reception, it has led to an ideological rejection of the notion of context-independent art. Aesthetic autonomy is here not abandoned, but rather reconfigured as a dynamic operational with respect to the ethical and political situation where we encounter the artwork. Sympathetic to the broad remit of Rebentisch’s argument, this article investigates the role of the beholder’s share within the context of such situated art. I draw specifically on Wolfgang Iser’s transformation of a negative aesthetics from binaries of negation/affirmation into an enabling structure where the organization of signifiers serve not the designation of a signified object, but rather designate instructions for the production of the signified. This requires work of the situated beholder, who must negotiate access to the work’s content by bringing her orientation into play. Installation art, thus conceived, constitutes a space that while virtualized – removed from functional imperatives – compels acts of imagination/ideation by problematizing our habitual dispositions. (shrink)

At the core of Félix Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm is a conception of subjectivity that somehow relies upon the notion of animism. Even though this apparently Romantic return to animism may seem vague and perhaps even naive, it forms the very framework that Guattari asks us to pass through, at least provisionally, in order to fully grasp his last project. I will therefore attempt to demystify this important concept theoretically before showing how the aesthetic machines of Japanese contemporary art – and (...) more specifically, the conceptual art of Yoko Ono – stage one key aspect of Guattari’s animism: machinic heterogenesis. Guattari travelled to Japan many times in the years leading up to the publication of Chaosmosis and Japanese contemporary art allowed him to bolster some of its theoretical claims with concrete examples. I will argue that it is through the lens of Japanese contemporary art that Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm might propel us beyond the old-guard strategies of modernism. Just as we are asked to pass through a certain notion of animism to understand the relational onto-logic of Chaosmosis, Japanese contemporary art itself demands a similar conceptual framework in order to be disappropriated from an all-too-Western canon. To this end, I supplement Guattari’s work with speculative readings of Japanese philosophy. (shrink)