Wo steht’s Du, Kollege? / Where do you stand, colleague?

Kunstkritik als Gesellschaftskritik / Art criticism and social critique
Symposium on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of „Texte zur Kunst“

December 11th , 2010, Hebbel-Theater am Ufer (HAU 1)

Conference Organizers: Isabelle Graw & André Rottmann
Conference language: English
Tickets: 7€, reduced 5€

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the renowned Berlin-based
journal for contemporary art, this symposium investigates art
criticism’s potential to become social critique. At the time of the
journal’s foundation in Cologne in 1990, it was the return to the
methods of social art history that promised to link current artistic
production to larger economic and ideological frameworks. Even if this
approach has remained an important touchstone in the critical work of
the journal and its most frequent contributors, new models have emerged:

Discussions around biopolitics and immaterial labour under postfordist
conditions have radically questioned long-held methodological
assumptions about the visual arts’ potentially antagonistic role in the
capitalist societies of the West. Moreover, the notion of the aesthetic,
for many years utterly dismissed due to its association with idealist
concepts of autonomy has returned in unforeseen ways, for instance with
recourse to an emphatic and ethically motivated defence of aesthetic
experience and an immersive attention to formal detail.

The symposium takes this situation as a point of departure in order to
reflect the role and potential of art criticism as social critique today.

Program, Saturday, December 11th , 2010

4 p.m.:
Official Welcome
by Arend Oetker, Berlin
and
Isabelle Graw, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin

Opening Statement
by Diedrich Diederichsen, Wien/Berlin

4:30 p.m.:
Panel I: New Spirit of Criticism? The Biopolitical Turn in Perspective

Like no other field of theoretical investigation, studies of biopolitics
and related discourses around immaterial forms of labour in postfordism
have come to inform recent art criticism and history. Such an approach
to art allows a revisiting of historical as well as contemporary
artistic practices in terms of their complicity with an economic and
political regime that seeks to produce social life and to control
subjectivity by way of internalized notions of productivity, creativity
and individual freedom. It is these notions, still so dear to art
historical discourse, which seem more problematic from such a vantage
point than repressive structures of authoritative interpellation. Yet
the urgent question arises and needs to be addressed in how far this new
master trope of (art) criticism does not itself amount to a totalizing
gesture that subsumes all aesthetic phenomena to the insurmountable
grasp of a omnipresent but elusive regime of power. Is the recourse to
biopolitical thought maybe even part and parcel of the notion of life it
wishes to critically analyze?

with

Franco Berardi, Milan
Luc Boltanski, Paris
Sabeth Buchmann, Vienna/Berlin
André Rottmann, Berlin
chaired by Martin Saar, Frankfurt am Main/ Berlin

6:30 p.m.:
Panel II: Between Specifity and Context. Social Art History Revisited

Social Art History, as it had been rediscovered and expanded as a
methodology in Anglo-American art history in the early seventies, once
provided the privileged critical model of aligning supposedly autonomous
aesthetic phenomena with the specific historical, discursive,
ideological and economic conditions that determined their production and
the subjectivity of both artist and beholder. However, this approach was
rightfully contested for its tendency to interpret art works in a rather
schematic fashion as mere illustrations of social conditions, thereby
ultimately neglecting the genuine logic of the aesthetic in its capacity
to estrange the beholder’s self-image as well as the perception of
life-world reality. Are there theoretical models today that while
staying true to Social Art History’s methodological insights can lead a
way out of this theoretical impasse? Is there a way to reconcile
formalist or phenomenological considerations with determining historical
factors? And how could one write a contemporary social history in a
non-reductive way, given recent shifts in media culture and forms of
immaterial labour?

with
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Cambridge, Mass./New York
Andrea Fraser, Los Angeles
Gertrud Koch, Berlin
Isabelle Graw, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin
chaired by Sven Lütticken, Amsterdam/Utrecht

8:30 p.m.:
Break

9:30 p.m.:
Panel III: From the Anti-Aesthetic to Aesthetic Experience?

In recent years art criticism has witnessed a complete re-evaluation of
the validity and reach of the notion of the aesthetic. Whereas
postmodern theories of artistic production of the 1980s were largely
determined by an anti-aesthetic impulse in their attempt to contest
idealist tenets of art’s bourgeois appreciation, today’s debates are
shaped by a return of the aesthetic in terms of new valuation and
conceptualization of the beholder’s experience of artworks even if those
defy modernist ideals of autonomy and self-sufficiency. This section
sets out to explore the implications and repercussions of this paradigm
shift: Is the notion of aesthetic experience inadvertently championing
an individualistic idea of the beholder? In how far can it provide a
model paying attention to the specificity of a work both in terms of its
form, content and social context rather than explicating a universal
mode of perception? Could it be that the aesthetic is reliant on an
emphatic idea of Art that for many good reasons had been challenged if
not utterly shattered by critical art practices ever since the
avant-gardes and the new spirit of capitalism that is to an extent based
on the recuperation of artistic critique?

with

T.J. Clark, London
Helmut Draxler, Stuttgart/Berlin
Jutta Koether, Hamburg/New York
Juliane Rebentisch, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin
chaired by Christoph Menke, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin

11:30 p.m.:
Reception at HAU 1 restaurant
with DJ EFDEMIN

Texte zur Kunst
Redaktion / Editorial Board
Strausberger Platz 19
10243 Berlin
Germany
Fon: +49 30 30 10 45 340
Fax: +49 30 30 10 45 344
mailto:redaktiontextezurkunst.de
redaktiontextezurkunst.de
www.textezurkunst.de