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The conference "Kunst und Gebrechen" ("Art and Defects"), which was scheduled from March 19th to March 21st and then postponed due to Covid-19, finally took place from November 5th through to November 7th. [...] The conference had a clear biographical focus: Most of the fourteen presentations sought to disentangle the influence any clear "defects" artists might have had on their work or their reception. Of course, this already poses a problem that many of the speakers addressed: the idea of "defects" presupposes a teleological norm, be it physical, mental or concerning age or gender, from which it is possible to deviate. A defect is a defect first and foremost in the eye of the beholder and, as Manfred Kern mentioned in his introduction, it can be seen not just as an impediment, but as a catalyst for artistic expression, too.
In recent years, critics and art historians have pointed to an 'educational turn', a rise in participatory pedagogical art projects and artist-led experimental schools. This essay considers artist-led projects and museum programmes that restage or reenact educational experiments from the past, analysing their limits and possibilities in the study and presentation of modern art history. Much like performance art, pedagogy is ephemeral and contingent, and yet it differs in that it does not establish a fixed spectatorial role. To be understood it must be participated in, for, as Josef Albers described his teaching, 'we are gathering experience'.
In a time when 'internationalization' and 'diversity' have become key areas universities are expected to excel in, it may seem an almost self-evident endeavor to install a memorial for a figure as influential and internationalist as Du Bois, whose connection to the Humboldt University outlasted two ideologically very different political systems. Planned to be positioned in the ground floor of the main building, the memorial, which will start production as soon as the last funding has been secured, reveals an image right at its center that "exist[s] in virtually every student's life and family album, and commonly serve[s] as vehicle[s] of recognition, remembrance and commemoration": the class photograph. What are the main considerations underlying the W. E. B. Du Bois Memorial's concept and design? How has it evolved so far? And what can such a memorial realistically achieve?
Havana's apartment-galleries have been vital venues for the city's art scene since the 1990s, hosting art exhibitions, workshops, and conferences. In the context of Cuba's limited art market and dearth of cultural institutions with international reach, these residential spaces have offered artists a unique opportunity to display their work and to connect with international art circuits. Focusing on the histories of three specific apartment-galleries - El Apartamento, Estudio Figueroa-Vives, and Avecez Art Space - this chapbook reflects on the complex interplay of the local and the global in the 'worlding' of cultural institutions.
Enduring ornament
(2020)
This is an essay about rust. Iron usually plays the part of strength, stubbornness, and impenetrability, but rust registers the dimension of time in the material, reminding us that it always carries the potential for its own decomposition. While great expense is incurred to stave off iron's oxidization, we read the uselessness that rust precipitates as an interruption of the instrumental logics that sustain racial capitalism. Looking to the rusted ring that became Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's "Enduring Ornament" (1913), we consider how the discarded and defunctionalized lend themselves to ornamental redeployment. The essay then turns to works by the contemporary American artists David Hammons and Andrea Fraser, both of which transform Richard Serra's rusty steel sculptures into a backdrop for fleeting gestures of impromptu reclamation. Attending to questions of susceptibility and monumental weathering, these reflections look to rusty leakages that play out the impossibility of refusing the environment. Rust, we suggest, is a material archive of exposure that does not keep itself, but flakes apart and seeps away.
Over the six months in which Vajiko Chachkhiani's "Living Dog Among Dead Lions" was exhibited at the Georgian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, heavy rain was pouring inside the installation. This artificially generated process provokes thoughts on the nature of the here and now as well as of the afterlife and of the future appearance of the hut's water-sensitive insides. Eventually, the spaces and furniture exposed to rain and water stagnation will begin to rot and disintegrate, and mould and moss might grow over them. Its viewers feel caught between what they see and what they hope to see; between their perceptions and expectations, in an exceptional time zone where 'natural' weathering is being performed as a subject of meditative observation.
Inner world and milieu : art, madness, and Brazilian psychiatry in the work of Nise da Silveira
(2024)
This short essay focuses on the work of Brazilian doctor Nise da Silveira, a pioneer in psychiatry who introduced artistic tools to work with psychiatric patients, especially those diagnosed as psychotic. She founded the Museum of Images from the Unconscious in 1952 inside an asylum in Rio de Janeiro to assemble and exhibit the works produced by her patients. As an iconoclast who did not systematize her theory, she engaged with several European psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and thinkers to produce a very innovative reflection and practical clinical work. Her work resonates in particular with French Institutional Psychotherapy, as well as with Frantz Fanon's psychiatric work in Algeria, but, differently from the former, places art at the core of its clinical method and proposes a radical positioning against every form of medicalized approach.
Arnd Wedemeyer's article focuses on the German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–86), who did not shy away from describing the social order with traditional organic metaphors, such as the notion of a 'central organ'. However, it is above all the - plastic - relationship between society and art that is at issue in Wedemeyer's article, entitled 'Pumping Honey: Joseph Beuys at the documenta 6'. Using the term 'Soziale Plastik', Beuys not only classified his own artistic practice as essentially sculptural but, more importantly, thematized its heterogeneous yet anything but passive relationship to art market, exhibition, museum, and various modes of reception, as well as staked its political claim. Wedemeyer looks at Beuys's contribution to the 1977 documenta, 'Honey Pump at the Workplace', in order to argue that the layered invocation of plasticity characteristic of Beuys's practice and theorizing ought not be historicized, as is commonly done, as an instantiation of the excessive, transgressive - and quite possibly disingenuous - zeal of the neo-avant-garde. Beuys's 'Plastik' should not be confused with anti-aesthetic formlessness, base materialism, a post-Duchampian ruination of the 'objet trouvé', and least of all a Neoromantic or Wagnerian projection or hypostatization of the autonomous work of art. The avant-gardes of the twentieth century have rendered the relationship of art and aesthetics tenuous at best, their artistic 'innovations' straining against the supratemporally or anthropologically defined characteristics of aesthetic valuation, play, or force. While many have sought to address this problem by tethering art to society in a shared 'contemporaneity', the article explores the implications of recasting this relation as one of plasticity, using the conceptual richness harvested by Catherine Malabou.