INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
ART AND METAPHYSICS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND BEYOND

School of Humanities and Social Sciences, International University Bremen
May 18-21, 2006

Organised by Profs. Dres. Isabel Wünsche, Paul Crowther, Ursula Frohne

The relation between visual art and metaphysics has been of the greatest
importance on both conceptual and historical grounds. For centuries it
has been felt that visual art can express important insights about
humanity’s relation to the cosmos. With the development of radical new
tendencies in the twentieth century – and consequent disruptions of
traditional ways of understanding art’s relation to reality – this
possibility has become more important still. And with current
transformations of sensibility arising from new media, it is likely to be
of equal, if not even greater, futural significance.

The conference will, accordingly, approach the relation of art and
metaphysics from two different but converging directions. The first
centers upon philosophical problems of meaning and ontology in the visual
arts, and also the way in which they might disclose broader metaphysical
‘truths’ about humanity’s relation to the cosmos. These issues will be
raised through discussion of idioms – such as figuration, abstraction,
conceptualism, and the new technologies – which have dominated
twentieth-century artistic creation and the critical responses to it.
Attention could also be paid to the possibilities, which these offer for
contemporary artistic development, and to those viewpoints, which see
artistic production as a means of ‘deconstructing’ metaphysical meaning.
The other approach will center on the use of metaphysical and cognate
ideas such as the scientific and religious in specific twentieth-century
and contemporary art-historical contexts. Our concern here is to explore
ways in which artists and their interpreters have employed such ideas as
inspiration for and/or as explanations of their practice; and to consider
ways in which metaphysical ideas might throw new light on such practices,
or on their historical significance or on both.

The conference will bring together philosophers, art historians, culture
theorists, historians of science, media theorists, and artists from
Europe, North America, and Australia in order to discuss these
transdisciplinary issues beyond the scope of individual disciplines.

PROGRAM

Thursday, May 18, 2006
Registration
Dinner
Introductory Address: Paul Crowther, “The Intrinsic significance of the Image”
Discussion

Friday, May 19, 2006
9:30 - 13:00 three parallel sessions (A) with coffee break

Session A1: Metaphysics and Artistic Meaning I

Clive Cazeau: The end of art: an inadequate metaphysics
Rob van Gerwen: Art and the Metaphysics of Experience
Nicholas Davey: Hermeneutics and Twentieth-Century Art
Jinhee Choi: Formalism and the ‘Metaphysical Hypothesis’

Session A2: Biologistic Ideas in Modern Art and its Critical Discourse

Nicole C. Karafyllis: Nature as artist or engineer? Living entities, media
and reproduction, 1850-1920
Mark Antliff: Framing Intuition: Bergson and the Art of Henri Matisse
Christa Lichtenstern: Henry Moore and Goethe: Some Morphological Aspects

Oliver Botar: Biologism and Modernism: The Case of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Session A3: The Sublime

Cliff McMahon: Diebenkorn, Wallace Stevens, and Ultimate Order
Ian Greig: The Aesthetics of the Sublime in David Bohm's Philosophy of Physics
Susanne Ackers: Technologies of the Sublime: Immersive Installations
Regine Prange: The American Sublime: Landscape in der Western Film

Lunch

14:30 - 18:00 three parallel sessions (B) with coffee break

Session B1: Metaphysics and Artistic Meaning II

Katerina Reed-Tsocha: Mechanical Reproduction and Twentieth-Century Art
Graham McFee: The Metaphysics of Artistic Meaning
Matthew Rampley: The Beginning of Art
Andrea Rehberg,: tba

Session B2: Organicism in Modern Art and its Critical Discourse

Annika Waennerberg: The History of the Organic: Transformations of a Concept
Clemena Antonova: The Organic Art History Writing of Pavel Florensky
Barbara Wittmann: Organicist Concepts in Art Education
Elke Sohn: Building the city as an organism – Organicist concepts in
German planning after the Second World War

Session B3: Science in Art (and Vice Versa)

Ursula Frohne: Science of the Image
Karen Lang: “Erwin Panofsky, Rosalind Krauss, and the Illusions of a
Scientific Art History”
Ingeborg Reichle: Is Science the New Art?

Dinner
Keynote Address: Linda Dalrymple Henderson: “Recovering the Meta-realities
of Modernism -- from Science and Geometry to Mysticism/Occultism”
Discussion

Saturday, May 20, 2006
9:30 - 13:00 three parallel sessions (C) with coffee break

Session C1: Metaphysics, Architecture, and the Enclosure of Space

Jale Erzen: Metaphysical Meaning in Late Ottoman Architecture
Alexandra Stara: The Metaphysics of Modernist Architecture
Eliana Perotti: Architecture as a metaphysical metaphor: the prefigurative
aesthetics of architectural and urban images in Giorgio de Chirico’s
pittura metafisica
Scott Koterbay: Deconstruction and Architecture

Session C2: Abstract Art, Spiritual Reality, and Infinity

Michael White: Afterimages: Mondrian and Dialectics
Christina Lodder: Kazimir Malevich and Nikolai Fedorov
Isabel Wünsche: The Heritage of the Avant-Garde: Vladimir Sterligov and
his School
Jane Sharp: Abstraction in Central Asia: The Amaravella Group

Session C3: Ontology and Meaning in New Media

Christoph Kluetsch: The Concepts of Information and Aesthetic in Early
Computer Art
Anna Munster: Embodied Ontologies: From Concept to Affect
and Back Again in New Media
Maria Walsh: Two Thinks at One Time: The Immersive Spectator
Nils Röller: Intensity as a Category in Digital Aesthetics

Lunch

14:30 - 18:00 Discussions with Coffee Break
Round-Table Discussion 1: Metaphysics and Artistic Meaning
Round-Table Discussion 2: Abstract Art
Round-Table Discussion 3: Ontology of New Media

Reception

Sunday, May 21, 2006
9:30 - 12:00 Congress Wrap-Up Sessions

For registration please visit:
http://artmeta.iu-bremen.de
For further information, please contact:
Prof. Paul Crowther, p.crowtheriu-bremen.de, +49 421 200 3341