Monograph by Burkhard Meltzer
Was heute als Gegenwartskunst bezeichnet wird, ist ohne Design nicht zu denken. Jener avantgardis... more Was heute als Gegenwartskunst bezeichnet wird, ist ohne Design nicht zu denken. Jener avantgardistische Bruch, der sich zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts von kanonisch definierten Formaten und Gattungen der Kunst verabschiedet, markiert zugleich den Beginn einer fortdauernden Beziehung zum Design. Die einst radikale Geste der Avantgarden, mit jedem beliebigen Material ein Kunstwerk zu behaupten, bildet heute eine Grundlage zeitgenössischer Kunstauffassung. Zugleich thematisieren Künstler*innen mit Hilfe des Designs ein bestimmtes Verhältnis zum Leben – als Befremden, offene Kritik oder in alternativen Entwürfen.
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Life on display: Design in discourses of art after the avant-gardes
What is known as “contemporary art” today is unthinkable without design. Looking back to the beginning of the 20th century, avant-garde`s break with canonically defined formats and genres also marks the beginning of art`s continuing relationship with design. The once radical avant-garde gesture to claim a work of art with any material, forms the basic notion of contemporary art now. At the same time, artists have been using design to establish certain relations to life – in terms of alienation, open criticism, or alternative plans.
Articles by Burkhard Meltzer
Journal for Contemporary Aesthetics, 2024
Experiences of sensing of and finding oneself in a place largely depend on the design of atmosphe... more Experiences of sensing of and finding oneself in a place largely depend on the design of atmospheres. Against the background of an increasing interest in ecological perspectives across various disciplines and regions, this text revisits Gernot Böhme’s respective aesthetic concept from the early 1990s. Arturo Escobar’s recent publication, “Designs for the Pluriverse,” which aims at restructuring relations between local design practices and global connections, will serve as a contemporary space of resonance for this exploration. How far might the aesthetic concept of atmosphere help to bridge gaps within today’s pluriversal thinking?
Globalizing the Avant-Garde, 2025
On the background of Europe`s killing fields that brought devastation in place of modern progress... more On the background of Europe`s killing fields that brought devastation in place of modern progress, the East`s programmatic counter-position did play an important role in Avant-Garde movements of the early 20th century.
Even if respective works resemble a broad complex of imageries, they neither just randomly connect to East Asia nor do they just re-establish a notorious exotism. Rather, they have been at work to “transform sensibilities”, i.e., aesthetic categories (Elizabeth Chang).
My anthology contribution deals with the influential and contradictory position of Johannes Itten during the 1940s, providing a detailed study of the exhibition “Chinese Contemporary Painting“ (curated by Itten at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Zürich, 1942) and of some of his own art works. Despite of obvious semi-colonial power structures between East Asia and Europe, this case also reveals transcultural ambivalences that might have helped to develop a self-critical and relational understanding of art today.
Alternative Mobility, 2024
To be mobile, is often articulated as imperative for people, commodities, and infrastructure toda... more To be mobile, is often articulated as imperative for people, commodities, and infrastructure today. We carry mobile phones, work from different places, and buy things that have travelled a long way. But how about immaterial notions, concepts, or cultural tokens, dispersed around the globe?
Though often overlooked or taken for granted, time and timing does play an important role not just in daily routines of living and working, but also as concept to indicate cultural relations. The “contemporary” is such a concept that appears to be connected very much to mobility in globalization. At many places around the globe, one could meet the temporal category as demand (to be contemporary!), in respectively labelled culture spaces, or spread throughout press releases.
While at the same widely distributed, the contemporary has been controversially discussed recently. For many, it seems to have become too much a hallmark of globalism, and closely tied to the colonial heritage of humanist universalism. Nevertheless, the contemporary still seems to be distributed as some standard token in a largely synchronized world.
Dem Raum Raum geben. Marguerite Hersbergers architektur- und raumbezogenes Werk, Wien: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2023
On the post-modern media condition and some architecture-related works by Marguerite Hersberger.
Ästhetische Ordnungen und Politiken des Wohnens. Häusliches und Domestisches in der visuellen Moderne, Transcript Bielefeld, 2023
A vast number of post-postmodern cabinet walls and patterned surfaces overlay the modern white cu... more A vast number of post-postmodern cabinet walls and patterned surfaces overlay the modern white cube in Henrike Naumann's exhibition 2000. Mensch. Natur. Twipsy., which was installed at the Kunstverein Hannover in 2019. This field of tension between living room and art space is explored in three steps. First, a historical excursus recalls the removal of furniture from the emerging white cube in the 1920s. This is followed by an examination of a room in Naumann's exhibition. Against this background, some critical reflections are formulated on Jacques Rancière's influential theory of an enduring aesthetic regime of modernity-and its inextricable links between the design of everyday surroundings and art spaces.
Technik-Ästhetik. Zur Theorie technisch-ästhetischer Realität, 2022
Angesichts einer wachsenden digitalen Infrastruktur erscheint es paradox, gerade die Bedeutung de... more Angesichts einer wachsenden digitalen Infrastruktur erscheint es paradox, gerade die Bedeutung der Materialität hervorzuheben. Allerdings sind auch immaterielle Datenströme auf körperlich greif- oder vielmehr wischbare Schnittstellen angewiesen. Zum einen wende ich mich der Frage nach Dinglichkeit vor dem Hintergrund aktueller Interdependenzen zwischen Technik und Ästhetik in der Gegenwartskunst zu. Zum anderen erkunde ich das Thema mit Blick auf Dingdiskurse der vergangenen zwei Dekaden, die u.a. in Kultur-, Sozial- und Kunstwissenschaften grundlegende Veränderungen in Beziehungen zwischen belebten und unbelebten Akteuren – zwischen Dingen und Menschen, aber auch zwischen Dingen und anderen Dingen –, festgestellt haben. Im folgenden Beitrag versuche ich, mit Hilfe künstlerischer Arbeiten von Oliver Laric (die u.a. 2019 im Schinkelpavillon, Berlin zu sehen waren) sowie der Stack-Theorie von Benjamin H. Bratton (The Stack, 2015) den weichen Konturen einer aktuellen Dinglichkeit auf die Spur zu kommen. Es handelt sich um eine Dinglichkeit, die zwischen digitalen Infrastrukturen, materiellen Assemblagen und menschlicher Interaktion viele Übergänge und Überlagerungen, ja sogar wechselseitige Transformationen erkennen lässt.
Looking at a growing digital infrastructure, it seems paradoxical to emphasize just the importance of materiality. However, immaterial data streams also depend on interfaces that can be physically grasped – or rather: wiped. On the one hand, I turn to the question of thingness against the background of current interdependencies between technology and aesthetics in contemporary art. On the other hand, I explore the topic with a view to discourses of thingness in the past two decades, which have identified fundamental changes in relations between animate and inanimate actors – between things and people, but also between things and other things – in art, social and media studies in particular. In the following article, I attempt to trace the soft contours of a current thingness with the help of artistic works by Oliver Laric (on view at the Schinkelpavillon, Berlin in 2019) and Benjamin H. Bratton's stack theory (The Stack, 2015). It is a thingness that reveals many transitions and overlaps – even reciprocal transformations, between digital infrastructures, material assemblages, and human interaction.
Working and Living, 2021
Artists live and work. This sentence, with corresponding place name, introduces the short text th... more Artists live and work. This sentence, with corresponding place name, introduces the short text that accompanies practically every art exhibition, media release, or grant application. The information inevitably provokes geographical and cultural allocations: known or unknown, center or periphery, and sometimes several places—possibly as an indication of cosmopolitan mobility. As mundane as this observation might seem at first glance, it proves most telling upon inquiring into the perception of artistic work as being normal— but quite special, after all. The fact that one could even find this astonishing and possibly even a springboard for art theoretical ruminations lies in the distinctive use of ordinary language in the field of art. It emphasizes a certain conformity to a social standard and is a positively demonstrative indication that artists work and live just like everybody else. This is an iteration of a certain normalization that is reinforced with every respective reiteration. Hardly anyone realizes that it may once have indicated an agenda, and yet, this was most certainly the case in 1953 when the studios and flats were built at Wuhrstrasse 8/10 in Zurich at the height of postwar modernism in Switzerland.
Arbeiten und Wohnen, 2021
Künstlerinnen leben und arbeiten. Fast in jedem Kurztext zu Ausstellungen, Presseinformationen od... more Künstlerinnen leben und arbeiten. Fast in jedem Kurztext zu Ausstellungen, Presseinformationen oder Stipendienanträgen begegnet man diesem einleitenden Hinweis, versehen mit entsprechenden Ortsangaben. Unwillkürlich nimmt man dabei geografische und kulturelle Zuordnungen vor: bekannt oder unbekannt, Zentrum oder Peripherie, manchmal sogar mehrere Orte –möglicherweise als Ausweis einer kosmopolitischen Mobilität. Und darüber hinaus scheint die Information ein potenzielles Publikum zu beruhigen, dass Künstler eben auch leben und arbeiten. So trivial diese Beobachtung auf den ersten Blick scheinen mag, so aufschlussreich könnte sie sich für eine Auseinandersetzung damit erweisen, wie normal künstlerische Arbeit wahrgenommen wird – und dennoch als etwas Besonderes. Die Formulierung impliziert einerseits ein bestimmtes Verständnis von Kunstwerken und andererseits von jener Arbeit, mit der sie geschaffen werden. Damit wird eine gewisse Anpassung an einen gesellschaftlichen Standard betont und auf geradezu demonstrative Weise darauf hingewiesen, dass Künstlerinnen wie alle anderen auch arbeiten und leben. Heute fällt es kaum noch auf, dass es sich dabei einmal um eine programmatische Ansage gehandelt haben könnte. Ein Blick zurück auf die Entstehungszeit der Atelier- und Wohnhäuser an der Zürcher Wuhrstrasse 8/10 zeigt jedoch, dass dies 1953 –auf dem Höhepunkt der Schweizer Nachkriegsmoderne – durchaus so aufgefasst wurde.
Realisms of the Avant-Garde, 2020
In den Realismen der Avantgarden kommt nicht die Welt in ihrer unmittelbaren Gegenwart zum Ausdru... more In den Realismen der Avantgarden kommt nicht die Welt in ihrer unmittelbaren Gegenwart zum Ausdruck, sondern vielmehr ihre Vergänglichkeit oder ihre mögliche Zukunft. Dabei spielt Design, das sich parallel als Disziplin industrieller Gestaltung im deutschsprachigen Raum zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts etabliert, eine Schlüsselrolle.
Brand New Life – Magazine for Art Criticism, 2019
2019 jährt sich die Gründung des Bauhauses zum einhundertsten Mal. Die universalistischen Program... more 2019 jährt sich die Gründung des Bauhauses zum einhundertsten Mal. Die universalistischen Programme der Moderne werden dabei noch einmal kritisch auf ihre Gegenwartstauglichkeit geprüft – in Design, Architektur und Kunst.
form, 2018
Design is principally a positive proposition, I was recently informed at a design school. So take... more Design is principally a positive proposition, I was recently informed at a design school. So taken aback was I by the matter- of-factness of this blithe pronouncement, which came in the context of a conference talk on the fundamental premises of aesthetics and design, that I decided to explore my antipathy towards it in more detail.
Ausstellen. Zur Kritik der Wirksamkeit in den Künsten, 2016
Der folgende Text kreist um zwei Installationen von Sean Edwards, die ich als zweifelhafte Konste... more Der folgende Text kreist um zwei Installationen von Sean Edwards, die ich als zweifelhafte Konstellationen bezeichnen möchte. Zwischen unscheinbaren Resten und auffallenden Situationen wirkt dabei gerade das besonders Unauffällige dubios – als Zweifel, der die Glaubwürdigkeit einer Begegnung betrifft.
Um die Ecke denken - Die Sammlung Museum Haus Konstruktiv (1986–2016) und Gastinterventionen, 2016
Although points of contact between design and art in the
context of Concrete Art from Zurich are ... more Although points of contact between design and art in the
context of Concrete Art from Zurich are only seen occasionally in
exhibitions, the exchange of programmatic convictions between
these two disciplines is a matter of course, especially during
the 1950s.
Allover – Magazin für Kunst und Ästhetik, 2012
Design zeichnet sich im Ausstellungskontext der Gegenwartskunst durch eine besondere Zweideutigke... more Design zeichnet sich im Ausstellungskontext der Gegenwartskunst durch eine besondere Zweideutigkeit aus: Einerseits wird man mit eindeutigen aktivistischen Impulsen angesprochen, andererseits – etwa in bestimmten Displays – jedoch durch die scheinbare, vermittelte Ausstellungssituation mit eher zweideutigen Signalen konfrontiert.
frieze d/e, 2012
About Fabian Marti`s recent works.
It`s Not a Garden Table – Art and Design in the Expanded Field, 2011
Stefan Burger – Sehr, sehr dünne Suppe, 2010
Omitting to do it and at the same time wondering how it would be to do
it, and thinking of havin... more Omitting to do it and at the same time wondering how it would be to do
it, and thinking of having done the same thing often. Samuel Beckett's last work reads like an allegory of Stefan Burger's exhibitions, in that it describes the convergence of different times and decision-making processes.
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Monograph by Burkhard Meltzer
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Life on display: Design in discourses of art after the avant-gardes
What is known as “contemporary art” today is unthinkable without design. Looking back to the beginning of the 20th century, avant-garde`s break with canonically defined formats and genres also marks the beginning of art`s continuing relationship with design. The once radical avant-garde gesture to claim a work of art with any material, forms the basic notion of contemporary art now. At the same time, artists have been using design to establish certain relations to life – in terms of alienation, open criticism, or alternative plans.
Articles by Burkhard Meltzer
Even if respective works resemble a broad complex of imageries, they neither just randomly connect to East Asia nor do they just re-establish a notorious exotism. Rather, they have been at work to “transform sensibilities”, i.e., aesthetic categories (Elizabeth Chang).
My anthology contribution deals with the influential and contradictory position of Johannes Itten during the 1940s, providing a detailed study of the exhibition “Chinese Contemporary Painting“ (curated by Itten at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Zürich, 1942) and of some of his own art works. Despite of obvious semi-colonial power structures between East Asia and Europe, this case also reveals transcultural ambivalences that might have helped to develop a self-critical and relational understanding of art today.
Though often overlooked or taken for granted, time and timing does play an important role not just in daily routines of living and working, but also as concept to indicate cultural relations. The “contemporary” is such a concept that appears to be connected very much to mobility in globalization. At many places around the globe, one could meet the temporal category as demand (to be contemporary!), in respectively labelled culture spaces, or spread throughout press releases.
While at the same widely distributed, the contemporary has been controversially discussed recently. For many, it seems to have become too much a hallmark of globalism, and closely tied to the colonial heritage of humanist universalism. Nevertheless, the contemporary still seems to be distributed as some standard token in a largely synchronized world.
Looking at a growing digital infrastructure, it seems paradoxical to emphasize just the importance of materiality. However, immaterial data streams also depend on interfaces that can be physically grasped – or rather: wiped. On the one hand, I turn to the question of thingness against the background of current interdependencies between technology and aesthetics in contemporary art. On the other hand, I explore the topic with a view to discourses of thingness in the past two decades, which have identified fundamental changes in relations between animate and inanimate actors – between things and people, but also between things and other things – in art, social and media studies in particular. In the following article, I attempt to trace the soft contours of a current thingness with the help of artistic works by Oliver Laric (on view at the Schinkelpavillon, Berlin in 2019) and Benjamin H. Bratton's stack theory (The Stack, 2015). It is a thingness that reveals many transitions and overlaps – even reciprocal transformations, between digital infrastructures, material assemblages, and human interaction.
context of Concrete Art from Zurich are only seen occasionally in
exhibitions, the exchange of programmatic convictions between
these two disciplines is a matter of course, especially during
the 1950s.
it, and thinking of having done the same thing often. Samuel Beckett's last work reads like an allegory of Stefan Burger's exhibitions, in that it describes the convergence of different times and decision-making processes.
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Life on display: Design in discourses of art after the avant-gardes
What is known as “contemporary art” today is unthinkable without design. Looking back to the beginning of the 20th century, avant-garde`s break with canonically defined formats and genres also marks the beginning of art`s continuing relationship with design. The once radical avant-garde gesture to claim a work of art with any material, forms the basic notion of contemporary art now. At the same time, artists have been using design to establish certain relations to life – in terms of alienation, open criticism, or alternative plans.
Even if respective works resemble a broad complex of imageries, they neither just randomly connect to East Asia nor do they just re-establish a notorious exotism. Rather, they have been at work to “transform sensibilities”, i.e., aesthetic categories (Elizabeth Chang).
My anthology contribution deals with the influential and contradictory position of Johannes Itten during the 1940s, providing a detailed study of the exhibition “Chinese Contemporary Painting“ (curated by Itten at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Zürich, 1942) and of some of his own art works. Despite of obvious semi-colonial power structures between East Asia and Europe, this case also reveals transcultural ambivalences that might have helped to develop a self-critical and relational understanding of art today.
Though often overlooked or taken for granted, time and timing does play an important role not just in daily routines of living and working, but also as concept to indicate cultural relations. The “contemporary” is such a concept that appears to be connected very much to mobility in globalization. At many places around the globe, one could meet the temporal category as demand (to be contemporary!), in respectively labelled culture spaces, or spread throughout press releases.
While at the same widely distributed, the contemporary has been controversially discussed recently. For many, it seems to have become too much a hallmark of globalism, and closely tied to the colonial heritage of humanist universalism. Nevertheless, the contemporary still seems to be distributed as some standard token in a largely synchronized world.
Looking at a growing digital infrastructure, it seems paradoxical to emphasize just the importance of materiality. However, immaterial data streams also depend on interfaces that can be physically grasped – or rather: wiped. On the one hand, I turn to the question of thingness against the background of current interdependencies between technology and aesthetics in contemporary art. On the other hand, I explore the topic with a view to discourses of thingness in the past two decades, which have identified fundamental changes in relations between animate and inanimate actors – between things and people, but also between things and other things – in art, social and media studies in particular. In the following article, I attempt to trace the soft contours of a current thingness with the help of artistic works by Oliver Laric (on view at the Schinkelpavillon, Berlin in 2019) and Benjamin H. Bratton's stack theory (The Stack, 2015). It is a thingness that reveals many transitions and overlaps – even reciprocal transformations, between digital infrastructures, material assemblages, and human interaction.
context of Concrete Art from Zurich are only seen occasionally in
exhibitions, the exchange of programmatic convictions between
these two disciplines is a matter of course, especially during
the 1950s.
it, and thinking of having done the same thing often. Samuel Beckett's last work reads like an allegory of Stefan Burger's exhibitions, in that it describes the convergence of different times and decision-making processes.
prominente Rolle. Dinge gelten als ausgesprochen wirkmächtig, insofern
sie als Handlungsmedien und Wissensträger fungieren. In diesen Diskussionen
über die materielle Bedingung von kulturellen Praktiken ist die
ästhetische Dimension der Dinge zunehmend in den Hintergrund geraten.
Als Mitakteure in Handlungsverbünden scheinen Dinge ganz in ihrer
praktischen Bedeutung aufzugehen. Was dabei vernachlässigt wird, ist
zum einen, dass ihre Wirksamkeit nicht abzulösen ist von ihrer ästhetischen
und affektiven Kraft, und zum anderen, dass Stillstellung und Passivierung
von großer Bedeutung für jegliche Formen von Praxis und ihrer
Spielräume sind. Diesen Momenten der Abweichung und Potentialität
wird in den Künsten mit Verfahren der Neutralisierung von Praxis – wie
Ausstellen, Vorführen, Proben oder Modellieren – Raum gegeben.
Mit Beiträgen von Beatrice von Bismarck, Sabeth Buchmann, Kathrin Busch,
Thomas Elsaesser, Rubén Grilo, Johan Frederik Hartle, Felix Laubscher,
Burkhard Meltzer, Tido von Oppeln, Sophia Prinz, Marc Rölli, Stefan Römer,
Mirjam Schaub, Dagmar Steffen und Giulia Stoll.
Contributions by Dimitri Bähler, Lorenzo Bini, Bless, Thomas Dienes, Go Hasegawa, Rem Koolhaas, Thomas Lommée, Wolf Mangelsdorf, Jürgen Mayer H., Alva Noë, Rick Poynor, Catharine Rossi, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nathalie du Pasquier, Antonio Scarponi, Jerszy Seymour, Martino Stierli, John Thackara, Georg Vrachliotis and Allan Wexler.
Distinction: with texts by Tido von Oppeln,
Mateo Kries, Klaus Spechtenhauser, Burkhard Meltzer,
and Sven Lütticken
Participation: with texts by Alexander García
Düttmann, Monika Kritzmöller, Jennifer Allen, Judith
Welter, and a discussion with Martin Boyce, Frédéric
Dedelley, and Max Borka
Production: interviews with Jurgen Bey,
Matthew Smith, Mamiko Otsubo, Martino Gamper,
Martin Boyce, Sofia Lagerkvist / Front Design, Andrea
Zittel, Jerszy Seymour, Florian Slotawa, David Renggli,
and Julia Lohmann
Contributions by Sabine von Fischer, Jeroen Jongeleen, Burkhard Meltzer, Felix Schramm, Stefan Wagner, Andrea Winkler and Clemens von Wedemeyer.