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Monumental cares rethinks monument debates, site specificity and
art activism in light of problems that strike us as monumental or
overwhelming, such as war, migration and the climate crisis. The
book shows how artists address these issues, from Chicago and
Berlin to Oslo, Bucharest and Hong Kong, in media ranging from
marble and glass to postcards, graffiti and re-enactment. A
multidirectional theory of site does justice to specific places but
also to how far-away audiences see them. What emerges is a new
ethics of care in public art, combined with a passionate engagement
with reality harking back to the realist aesthetics of the
nineteenth century. Familiar questions can be answered anew: what
to do with monuments, particularly when they are the products of
terror and require removal, modification or recontextualisation?
And can art address the monumental concerns of our present? -- .
This book answers one of the most puzzling questions in
contemporary art: how did performance artists of the '60s and '70s,
famous for their opposition both to lasting art and the political
establishment, become the foremost monument builders of the '80s,
'90s and today? Not by selling out, nor by making self-undermining
monuments. This book argues that the centrality of performance to
monuments and indeed public art in general rests not on its
ephemerality or anti-authoritarian rhetoric, but on its power to
build interpersonal bonds both personal and social. Specifically,
the survival of body art in photographs that cross time and space
to meet new audiences makes it literally into a monument. The
argument of the book spans art in Austria, the former Yugoslavia,
and Germany: Valie Export, Peter Weibel and the Viennese Actionists
(working in Austria and abroad), Marina Abramovic, Sanja Ivecovic
and Braco Dimitrijevic (working in Yugoslavia and abroad), and
Joseph Beuys and Jochen Gerz (working in Germany and abroad). These
artists began by critiquing monumentality in authoritarian public
space, and expanded the models developed on the streets of Vienna,
Munich, Rome, Belgrade and Zagreb to participatory monuments that
delegate political authority to the audience. Readers interested in
contemporary art, politics, photography and performance will find
in this book new facts and arguments for their interconnection. --
.
Monumental cares rethinks monument debates, site specificity and
art activism in light of problems that strike us as monumental or
overwhelming, such as war, migration and the climate crisis. The
book shows how artists address these issues, from Chicago and
Berlin to Oslo, Bucharest and Hong Kong, in media ranging from
marble and glass to postcards, graffiti and re-enactment. A
multidirectional theory of site does justice to specific places but
also to how far-away audiences see them. What emerges is a new
ethics of care in public art, combined with a passionate engagement
with reality harking back to the realist aesthetics of the
nineteenth century. Familiar questions can be answered anew: what
to do with monuments, particularly when they are the products of
terror and require removal, modification or recontextualisation?
And can art address the monumental concerns of our present? -- .
If participation has been an ideal in politics since ancient
democracy, in art it became central only with the avant-gardes
emerging from WWI and the Russian Revolution. Politics and
aesthetics are still catching up with each other. In the 21st
century, since the revolutionary unrest of the 1960s, participation
in art and architecture has lost its utopian glow and become the
focus of a fierce debate: does 'participatory' art and architecture
shape social reality, or is it shaped by it? Contemporary critics
see in participation only technocratic control, while others
embrace it as a viable politics in an era of global capitalism.
This innovative book breaks the impasse by looking at how
participants themselves exert power, rather than being victimized
or liberated from it. From artists hijacking Google Earth to
protesters setting up a museum of the revolution in Cairo, art,
architecture and daily life are explored in their participatory
dimension.
Ugliness is very much alive in the history of art. From ritual
invocations of mythic monsters to the scare tactics of the early
twentieth-century avant-garde, from the cabinet of curiosities to
the identity politics of today, the ugly has been every bit as
active as the beautiful, and often much more of a reality - Why
then has it been so neglected? This book seeks to remedy this
oversight through both broad theoretical reflection and concrete
case studies of ugliness in various historical and cultural
contexts. The protagonists range from cooks to psychoanalysts, from
war prostheses to plates of asparagus, on a world stage stretching
from ancient Athens to Singapore today. Drawing across disciplinary
and cultural boundaries, the writers illuminate why ugliness,
associated over the millennia with negative categories ranging from
sin and stupidity to triviality and boredom, remains central to art
and cultural practice.
In this key text in the history of art and aesthetics, Karl
Rosenkranz shows ugliness to be the negation of beauty without
being reducible to evil, materiality, or other negative terms used
it's conventional condemnation. This insistence on the specificity
of ugliness, and on its dynamic status as a process afflicting
aesthetic canons, reflects Rosenkranz's interest in the metropolis
- like Walter Benjamin, he wrote on Paris and Berlin - and his
voracious collecting of caricature and popular prints. Rosenkranz,
living and teaching, like Kant, in remote Koenigsberg, reflects on
phenomena of modern urban life from a distance that results in
critical illumination. The struggle with modernization and idealist
aesthetics makes Aesthetics of Ugliness, published four years
before Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, hugely relevant to modernist
experiment as well as to the twenty-first century theoretical
revival of beauty. Translated into English for the first time,
Aesthetics of Ugliness is an indispensable work for scholars and
students of modern aesthetics and modernist art, literary studies
and cultural theory, which fundamentally reworks conceptual
understandings of what it means for a thing to be ugly.
Does 'participatory' art and architecture shape social reality, or
is it shaped by it? Shifting the ground of this debate, which tends
to assume one or other direction of influence, this innovative book
explores the inherently dialectic relationship between society and
the built environment. At the same time, it strives for a
historically conscious discussion of a very contemporary issue.
Chapters rethink the top-down model of participation and audience
activation of high modernism, from Alexander Dorner's immersive
museum to Mies van der Rohe's 'room(s) for play'; investigate
participation in spaces under political pressure, from exhibitions
in bombed-out buildings in besieged Sarajevo (1992-5) to the art
and organizing of revolution in Egypt (2012-13); draw historical
parallels between modes of participation and the exercise of power
that are seldom compared with one another, from sites of occupation
in 1968 Mexico and 2011 Spain; finally creating links between
cartography and feminism and between tourism and internet
surveillance. With these juxtapositions of the aesthetic and the
everyday, and the built and the mediated, new questions arise: is
space formed once and for all, or is it the changeable product of
changeable patterns of use? Does the aesthetic always correspond to
the political, or might an aesthetically authoritarian space be
conducive to social justice? In exploring these questions, this
book looks at how participants themselves exert power, rather than
being victimised or liberated from it.
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