Ground zero. The transitional space of contemporary art

The context of this essay is a larger project of mine which has been examining the concept of space and self which we have inherited in the Modern tradition. I owe a lot to the work of Alberto Perez-Gomez who has shown own how our concept of space as geometric void upon which a transcendent consciousness bears upon -fully codified by Descartes -evolved out of the detached abstract post-socratic philosophical tradition, and has gone on to fruition within technological society. If you live in the modern secular world, as most in the west now do, then this is the pre-given conceptual understanding of spatiality, and it has repercussions on how we understand our relationship to knowledge. In the detached perspective consciousness achieves knowledge by the appropriate correspondence of symbolic representations to an external reality. This is commonly called mediational epistemology. 1 The other tradition one could say comes out of the Abrahamic heritage of the west, and during the 20th century has been expressed in the works of the existentialists and phenomenologists. This work has been primarily a return of awareness to the dependency of our detached rational conceptualizing upon our embodiment and existential investment in reality. From this perspective space is not a void, not detached, but something we as body and mind, are within, and by our action achieve accord with truth, which includes but is not exclusive to conceptual understanding. This has repercussions for how we understand the artist's relationship to knowledge.

Leiden Elective Academic Periodical, 2022

The discursive relationship between ethics and aesthetics has been largely excluded from much contemporary postmodern theory. However, in recent years the texts of many theorists1 and the work of certain artists2 have heralded a timelyre-conceptualisation of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics by claiming that art has the potential to transform societal dynamics, practices and realities. Such theorists and artists have variously championed a re-conceived ethico-aesthetic dynamic, broady situated within three dominant strands: the “return to beauty”, “relational aesthetics” and ʻart as socially engaged practice”. In this paper I aim to contribute to such contemporary ethico-aesthetic debate by positing a an alternative, though complementary, lens through which to consider the transformative potential of art. Claiming that the artwork has the power to contest dominant and hegemonic social practices, I will further suggest (i) that the encounter with the artwork is a site of radical engagement with otherness, (ii) that this encounter with otherness offers the viewing subject a site at which to respond but, crucially, without having to act upon, the meaning-making of others and that (iii) thus the encounter with the artwork opens into a privileged liberatory, contemplative trans-subjective space in which the subject can imagine and create alternative “meaning-makings”, allowing the viewing subject to re- conceptualise hegemonic social practices and realities. Drawing primarily on Simone de BeauvoirʼsThe Ethics of Ambiguity (1948) and the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, I will interrogate Michael Hanekeʼs recent film, The White Ribbon (2009). Through an application of key philosophical concepts — such as temporality, bad faith, disclosure and radical alterity — I will suggest that such concepts offer a potentially transformative modality by which (i) individual ethical subjectivity can be re-structured (ii) the ethico-aesthetic dynamic can be re-invigorated and (iii) societal realities and practices can be re-perceived.

By introducing term 'Liminal Space' into theory and philosophy of architecture (referring to the spatial category necessary for the understanding and complete experience of the spectator facing the work of art or the artistic/performative event) we raise questions of needs, typologies and functions of concrete physical means used as a framework of its constitution. The idea of this research is also to emphasize the importance of a rather complex approach in presentation, perception and reception of the work of art or the artistic/performative event through a comprehensive way of merging of these activities, perceived mainly as separate components until now. Therefore the famous triad of questions from domain of architectural design: what (do we design?), with which means and in which ways?, and for whom?, applied onto understanding of the work of art or the artistic/performative event, offers a completely new answer -the artistic vision's placement through an overall scene design, with the use of the ephemeral architecture means, represents a basis for the creation of the spectator's own Liminal Space, through which he develops his own individual experience and interpretation. This paper aims at defining a new terminology considering proposed claim, partly through the existing theoretical framework, but also through the analysis of the exemplary work of Árpád Schilling and Krétakör production for the Prague Quadrennial 2011 (which took place at the abandoned and devastated printing hall complex in Prague, once the central spot of the Communist regime). Highlighting the reuse of the forgotten industrial heritage, this research points at qualities of these places and their potentials to become the new homes for the art.

Journal of Conscious Evolution, 2022

To the extent that art mirrors consciousness, what does the art of any age have to tell us about where we are as a species and civilization? In this paper, I suggest that modern and postmodern art reveal the tendency toward deconstruction, of our identities, as selves, as cultures, as a civilization. Through this process of deconstruction, there is a space offered to us through the experience of art, of freedom to recreate ourselves, our identities, and our sense of purpose and meaning in the cosmos. Grounding the inquiry in texts from various authors in the field of art history and the philosophy of consciousness, I present examples of art that deconstruct and reinvent, and invite the viewer (of the art) to self-reflect and consider how we may emerge anew from the experience of art. I invite the reader to engage in the same process. I also ask what the art of the current era can tell us about where we are and where we are going as a species. Keywords: Art, commodification, consciousness, deconstruction, evolution, existential crisis, materialism, modern, postmodern, reification, transcendence, transformation

Arts and Design Studies, 2016

This paper discusses the greater unfoldment of the mind of the artist as beyond asylum cases that most theorist and critics have argued for. By establishing a scope that exemplifies a symbolic resonance of an idea from the subconscious, the paper as well posits that the problem of semantics in describing the artists experience, observation , beauty or form , and context , are one of such technical reality that are gravely challenged as delayed mental illness. The objective of this paper has been to refute mental illness as acceptable analysis on the artist, but used in a stark way the terms that psychoanalytically communicates the parallel worlds that are only remote in their individual expressions of art have been established. The creative fields in art extols greater energies welling from a deeper but richer consciousness that may not be readily understood by all, are but sensitive to generally acceptable discussions, yet this paper draws references from Jackson Pollock’s Shamanis...

“Essentially, the only thing a man could possess is his own self. That self (Ego) is the sun shining with thousands of rays inside of his belly. Nothing else matters.” (P. Picasso) Slaven Tolj is one of few artists relativising Berislav Valuπek’s statement according to which “Croatian art in the world exists only in Croatia”. Tolj’s crucial project was made in 1991 (at the 16th Youth Biennale in Rijeka), an interpictorial instalation titled AY, AY, AY, an assemblage of pedestal and a cactus (“cactus is an error” declared the artist afterwards) and a reproduction of Giorggione’s Venus asleep, on which the artist intervened with his own corporal liquids. Venus, the sacrosanct iconic symbol, the trademark for carnal beauty and feminine seductiveness was spattered with artist’s semen as an illustration of mechanisms of imagination, at the same time beeing an ironical reaction (so called Pavlov’s reflex) to a historical convention of realistic painting. Antun MaraËi described Tolj’s project as “a rough arte povera-concretism”. ”In this work the author uses bourgeois painting as a centerfold” (Ademir Arapovi ). As well as in his other works, on the scent of New artistic practice (photographs, video showings, ambiance & video instalations and non-action perfomances, or of aggressive discourse), by his so called libidonous art this artist of “mocking sensibility” (as he was defined by Nada Beroπ) analyses sexual and somatic inhibitions and problematizes non-comunication, subjectiveness of perception, objectiveness of memory, reality and metareality, using a method of citation-appropriation, of redisign- alteration, or repetitive multiplying of motifs. According to Alexander Malo, it is necessary to offer “a periphery as an alternative“. Mise-en-scéne, thematic field for Tolj’s projects (time and site based, Kontext-Kunst) is always Dubrovnik, mitems of Mediterranean society, ”geometry of streets of the City and its empty spaces”, which are used as a scenography for an elliptic motif Et in Arcadia ego.

With the enormous chaotic changes taking place today, contemporary artists are showing us a vast and mystifying range of artworks that show glimpses of nascent worlds coming into being and just as quickly disappearing into oblivion. In Part One the author explores a world that seems to be gaining some traction-the world of the post-human. Contemporary art is showing glimpses of this still-forming world in artworks produced from a collision between, or interpenetration of virtual reality and empirical reality, giving rise to weird, horrific, and sometimes strangely beautiful forms. In Part Two the author seeks to penetrate "behind" this post-human art to the activity of the artist, in order to find the original "bringing forth" (Heidegger) of post-human artworks. This move reveals the fundamental place of revelation and prophecy as the origin of any artwork and thus indicates the essential nature of the post-human world.

A radical change is taking place in media art. Whilst the world at large is only just coming to terms with the Net and the computerisation of society, a new media shift is occurring, whose consequences are likely to be even greater. The wired, digital, dry world of computers is converging with the biological, wet world of living systems producing a moistmedia

Contemporary art is aesthetically very attentive to subjects of different nature. We can watch this aesthetic attention both in following the ways of traditional genres and in discovering some new ways to express human meanings of things. Since times when ready-made objects were fully institutionalized as creations of art traditional and newly discovered modes of creativity in relation to things were set as equal within the artworld. Painting and graphics are dealing with different surfaces creating their new visual qualities with lines and colours, sculpture is doing the same with volume, ready-mades and installations are doing the same changing regimes of human contacts with classes of artifacts. When mixed and combined in the whole of contemporary art as aesthetic experience this relation to subjects turns reflection on subiectum esse, the only reality of actual existence possible to be ruled by a human subject. Subjective reality of artifacts turns the analogue of subjective reality of a human being that contemplates subjective mode of existence in its ontological qualities compared with mentally revealed concepts and signs dealing with being itself, esse tantum. This presentation is dedicated to limits ad unlimitedness of possible meanings of subjects in contemporary art.