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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.
This chapter explores the intrinsic relationship between weather/weathering and the imaginary of the sea, which features in the work of artist Arthur Bispo do Rosário. Bispo was a black man who spent most of his life in psychiatric institutions. There is an important interplay between his psychotic deliriums and the production of hundreds of objects, many of them ships or forms that relate to the sea. These objects open up a discussion on decoloniality as they are embedded with marks left by the transatlantic slave trade.
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.
Transspezieskonzeptionen als Identitätskonzeptionen in Selbstinszenierungen, in populären Narrationen, in der Neurowissenschaft oder der Psychologie sind im Verhältnis zu anderen Transkonzepten (Transgender, Transkulturalität, Transnationalität, Transsozialität etc.) unterrepräsentiert und bieten gerade deshalb die Möglichkeit einer interdisziplinären und vergleichenden Analyse. Beobachtbar ist dabei, dass Transspezieskonzeptionen eine Mensch-Tier- Differenz zu unterminieren scheinen, indem sie menschliche Alleinstellungsmerkmale vorzugsweise von Identität, Person, Selbst und Psyche auf nichtmenschliche Tiere ausdehnen. Im Zentrum der Untersuchung steht deshalb die Frage, wie diese Konzeptionen mit den Begriffen 'Identität' und 'Spezies' genau verfahren und wie sie sich zu jener Grenze verhalten, die sie zu überschreiten vorgeben.