Joseph Beuys

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in World Art on 9 July 2019, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21500894.2019.1637639

German artist Rebecca Horn (b. 1944) produced some of her most innovative and consequential work during the 1970s, yet the body sculptures she designed have not received the attention they deserve, especially when compared with her later feature films, installations, and machine-like pieces. Horn created her works during the seventies while recovering from a severe lung poisoning that isolated her in a hospital for a long time. Looking closely at the works themselves, Horn’s own statements, and existing art-historical and theoretical commentaries, this study argues that her artistic production of this time articulated a longing for communication that followed her isolation, and considers her pieces to have the potential to transcend one’s own subjectivity in order to explore that of the other and create intersubjective connections between the performers. Her sculptural costumes will thus be interpreted as enabling their wearers to reconsider the perception of their surroundings in a less rational and more intersubjective way. In this paper, Horn’s work makes powerful contact with that of her teacher Franz Erhard Walther, Joseph Beuys, and artist and therapist Lygia Clark.

Resumen
Muchos creadores, a lo largo de la historia, se han sumergido en un ámbito oscuro y trasgresor; las pinturas negras y la trágica serie "Los desastres de la guerra", de Goya; los seres metamorfoseados y devorados en un violento acto sexual de Picasso; el mundo oscuro y árido dibujado por A. Kubin; Francis Bacon, a través de desnudos deformes e incoherentes, sangrientos y deshuesados; el mundo caótico y viscoso de David Lynch con criaturas que fluctúan cambiando su anatomía, amorfas y monstruosas (Eraserhead). Tod Browning, que presenta un circo repleto de seres con deformaciones espeluznantes que la misma naturaleza ha creado (Freaks). Lo extremo, lo abyecto, lo grotesco y lo monstruoso, son características que muchos artistas han izado como bandera de su trabajo. Desde los violentos desajustes picassianos a las hinchazones de Dobuffer, las mutilaciones y las laceraciones de De Kooning, el grupo Cobra y seguidores como Saura, los alargamientos de Giacometti o los sutiles desajustes entre forma y color de Léger y de Warhol, por no mencionar los hirientes trazados de Beuys, se podría establecer una catalogación de todas las violencias a las cuales el artista ha sometido a lo real en el momento de representarlo.
Dr. Adolfo Vasquez Rocca

Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video quickly became integral to the intense experimentalism of New York City's music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, which allowed composers to visualize their music and artists to sound their images. But as well as creating unprecedented forms of audiovisuality, video work also producedinteractive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption. This book explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music.

Earth Perfect? Nature, Utopia and the Garden is an eclectic, yet rigorous reflection on the relationship--historical, present and future--between humanity and the garden. Through the lens of Utopian Studies--the interdisciplinary field that encompasses fictions all the way through to actual political projects, and urban ideals; in a nutshell, addressing the human natural drive towards the ideal--Earth Perfect? brings together a selection of inspiring essays, each contributed by foremost writers from the fields of architecture, history of art, classics, cultural studies, farming, geography, horticulture, landscape architecture, law, literature, philosophy, urban planning and the natural sciences.
Through these joined voices, the garden emerges as a site of contestation and a repository for symbolic, spiritual, social, political and ecological meaning. Questions such as: "what is the role of the garden in defining humanity's ideal relationship with nature?" and "how should we garden in the face of catastrophic ecological decline?" are addressed through wideranging case studies, including ancient Roman Gardens in Pompeii, Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, the Gardens of Versailles, organic farming in New England and Bohemia's secret gardens, as well as landscape in contemporary architecture.
Issues relating to the utopian garden are explored thematically rather than chronologically, and organised in six chapters: "Being in nature", "inscribing the garden", "green/house", "The garden politic", "economies of the garden" and "how then shall we garden?". each essay is both individual in scope and part of the wider discourse of the book as a whole, and each is lusciously illustrated, bringing to life the subject with diverse visual material ranging from photography to historical documents, maps and artworks.

CATALOGUE D'EXPOSITION - Galerie Pauline Pavec

En 1919, Marcel Duchamp offrait à son ami et mécène Walter Arensberg, l’Air de Paris enfermé dans une ampoule. Par ce geste, par ce ready-made où ce que l’on inhale est déterminé et porté au rang d’art, l’artiste français, père de l’art contemporain, ouvre la voie à une sacralisation plastique de ce qui se respire et s’établit : l’effluve. En la choisissant comme médium, en lui permettant l’entrée au panthéon des matériaux explorés par le vingtième siècle, Duchamp met en lumière combien la valeur artistique de l’odeur est estimable. Immatériel précieux, elle révèle les émotions, ravive la mémoire et lie ce qui s’hume à la grande tradition du sacré.

Dans Odore, les œuvres présentées, toutes référant aux émanations, dessinent un voyage introspectif et interrogent la première attache qui a ramené les exhalaisons tout près des êtres humains, leur prédisant l’accessibilité à un autre monde. Les Grec.que.s et les Romain.e.s couvraient leurs statues d’onctions, laissant aux effluves le soin d’envoyer leurs prières au divin; les sorcières et les herboristes manipulaient les plantes en extrayant leurs essences ; les chamans chargeaient les fumées de la promesse d’une traversée mystique.

Les artistes contemporain.e.s, magicien.ne.s et alchimistes d’aujourd’hui, voient leur pratique et leur personne entrer en résonance avec la sacralisation des institutions culturelles. Le musée devenu lieu de pèlerinage sanctifie l’artiste, qui semble pouvoir y être accueilli en odeur de sainteté. Alors, le lien au sacré se fait par une forme de mystification de l’œuvre et de son.sa créateur.rice et certains travaux odorants aux allures autobiographiques, pourraient être observés comme de véritables reliques.

Cette notion de relique olfactive s’envisage également par des morceaux de chairs qui rappellent des instants vécus, qui poussent à éprouver et qui destinent à ressentir. Car l’odeur permet l’évocation, une évocation intime, viscérale, qu’il n’est pas nécessaire de verbaliser, mais que l’on porte en soi, que l’on chérit, comme on le ferait des croyances, des prières et des souvenirs olfactifs personnels qui tissent la grande histoire.

In 1929 Nikolas Calas photographed himself in a mirror of a wardrobe, in a room in Tinos with a hand-held camera (ΕΛΙΑ L003.124). The camera is not visible at first sight, as Calas tries to ‘hide’ it, positioning it in front of his tie. This self- portrait is a manifestation of early self- portraying in photography and can be compared to other modernist self-portraits of the time, especially the ones, where the camera is not visible but somehow hidden in the shadow (for e.g. Lotte Jacobi, ‘Autoportrait’, 1937).
When examining Calas’ poetry and prose texts it is noticeable, that mirrors are a constant motive, as I will try to show. Especially interesting is the connection between mirrors and translation, for example in the correspondence with Williams Carlos Williams, regarding the translations of Calas’ french poems ‘Wrested from Mirrors’, ‘The Agony Among the Crowd’, ‘Narcissus in the Desert’ and ‘To Regain the Day Again’ into American. Williams is borrowing the metaphor of the mirror from Calas thematizing the translator as the other, as a reflection of the original. By analyzing the metaphor of the mirror it is possible as well to reconsider the use of the Pseudonyms of Nikolas Calamaris as a reflection of himself.
After this considerations I will end my talk with the portfolio of prints and objects by eleven artists (Vincenzo Agnetti, Arakawa, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Meret Oppenheim, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, James Rosenquist) introduced by Nikolas Calas and edited in 1975 with the title Mirros of the mind.

This volume edited by Gene Ray collects essays developed from the 1998 symposium on artist Joseph Beuys at the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida. The included authors are: Lukas Beckmann, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Mel Chin, Pamela Kort, Kim Levin, Peter Nisbet, Gene Ray, Max Reithmann, and Joan Rothfuss. This PDF includes chapter 4: Gene Ray, "Joseph Beuys and the After-Auschwitz Sublime," pp. 55-74.

This research paper is presented by Mel Dixon to the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in the field of Visual Art at The Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, The University of Melbourne.

Supervisor: Dr Kate Daw
Date: October 2018

El arte de nuestro tiempo aturde ruidosamente con exhortaciones al silencio – señala Susan Sontag en una de las más pertinentes aproximaciones a la estética del silencio publicadas en los últimos años. He aquí un nihilismo coqueto, incluso alegre, afirma Son-tag. Reconocemos el imperativo del silencio, pero seguimos ha-blando. Ante el silencio podemos adoptar dos actitudes: o llevarlo al extremo de la autonegación total o practicarlo  de una manera “ingeniosamente incoherente”, dando por  sentado que los mitos del silencio y del vacío son tan enriquecedores como cualquier otro experimento creativo  .
Más que referirme a las múltiples acepciones del concepto de si-lencio desde el punto de vista lingüístico, antropológico, literario o espiritual en esta conferencia buscaré acotar la magmática car-tografía  del silencio en un arco cronológico y conceptual que irá desde la modernidad hasta el actual momento global, un amplísi-mo período que abordaremos con citas puntuales algunas del ám-bito de la teoría, la filosofía, el pensamiento  y otras del arte: mú-sica, cine y artes visuales.
Pero ¿qué papel ocupa en este proceso el silencio? En nuestra ci-vilización occidental, eminentemente verbal, siempre se ha pri-mado la palabra, el lenguaje y la actividad simbólica sobre el si-lencio, que se ha entendido como “el fondo” sobre el que el que se sitúa la figura, la palabra. Pero en el lenguaje existe también una noción alusiva, oblicua, opaca: “Todo lenguaje es indirecto o alusivo; es si, se quiere, silencio. Y siempre partiendo  no tanto de un uso empírico del lenguaje, sino  de su uso creador que sería sinónimo de silencio”.

Description and analysis of Herzog & de Meuron's early work, as featured in the exhibition/catalogue "First Works: Emerging Architectural Experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s" (Architectural Association, London November 2009 -February 2010; curated/edited by Francisco González de Canales and Brett Steele). Copyright © 2009 Architectural Association and the Authors

""When writing about Cage, we encounter many difficulties with terminology. How to describe in a summary manner, without misunderstandings a writer, composer, teacher, music and social critic, poet, painter, anarchist, speaker, cultural animator, mycologist and a New Yorker in one person? In relation to musical practice, with which he is most often associated, he preferred to describe himself as an “organizer of sounds” and it seems that it was not only a stylistic manipulation, but the expression of a certain attitude, characterized by a high degree of distrust in relation to the musical tradition (which Cage consistently challenged), inherited from aesthetic components such as composition, work of art, score, harmony, as well as the artistry of composition. A paradoxical and somewhat surprising feature of his artistic practice, which ultimately sought to deny the foundations of matters in which he dabbled, was that it at first glance, the accidental and absurd assumptions were the result of meticulous study and analysis, creating a very coherent and thoughtful whole. Th e conceptual dimension of Cage’s artistic achievements allows to situate his work within the phenomenon that Kosuth describes as “art after philosophy” , in turn Cage himself in a suggestive manner defines the philosophical and conceptual nature of his art, writing that “philosophy for the [contemporary] artist is what the Bible is for the priest”. Certainly, Cage’s artistic achievements should not be put in the same category with the achievements of artists, whose only tangible characteristic is that of a single sweeping gesture to crack down on binding canons, undefining all that is definite. Cage’s artistic and ideological path strongly denies such an image. This book takes a bearings of this path.
The aim of my work is the reconstruction of the philosophical framework that creates the conceptual content of the work of the author of Silence. This analysis is a de facto reconstruction of the foundations of his aesthetic and ideological system . The reconstruction appears to be interesting because it contains the schema of possible references of Cage’s aesthetic to its various philosophical aspects, including those that were oblivious to him. Aspect (Latin appearance) is a frame, from which is considered a given object or phenomenon. “Philosophical” means in this case - a reference to a philosopher or a philosophical position. In Cage’s “paradoxical case” the possibility of such an approach seems to be twofold. On the one hand it presents ideas that deserve, in my opinion, attention, because they seem to me to be the most “adequate” to present the creative path of the author of Music of Change and the most “in his spirit.” They are not only original concepts, their presence in the vicinity of Cage’s aesthetic views is often dictated by the duty to simply repeat what Cage himself considered the conceptual framework of his creative activity. I am first and foremost thinking about the views of D.T. Suzuki, H.D. Thoreau, J. Joyce, B. Fuller and M. McLuhan. Subsequently capturing the aesthetic phenomenon of the works of the author of Four in the light of philosophical and artistic ideas of F. Nietzsche, J. Dewey, S. Beckett, M. Heidegger, J.-P. Sartre, J. Derrida, J.-F. Lyotard, J.-N. Vuarnet and W. Welsch may be a risky treatment, but in my opinion, fully justified. On the other hand, built by Cage for more than half a century, the conceptual edifice of hisart, is not merely the chance result of various influences (conscious or unconscious), but appears in the eyes of the investigator as an independent being, deserving of attention and introduction, which on closer examination carries with it a whole new quality, putting the researcher in the face of unpleasant fact of almost complete incompatibility of the existing conceptual apparatus to describe this unexpected phenomenon. For the researcher, however, there is no other way. A researcher must come from that which is known, to perchance get to what is apparently unknown, or only temporarily inexpressible. He must at the same time give up many of the usual ways and habits, to see the matters from another perspective.
In the opinion of most researchers of the work of the author of Music of Changes a very important element that should be taken into account during the reconstruction of his views, is biography. This is the engine of his aesthetic choices. Spheres of practice and art, everyday experience and aesthetic experience are indeed inextricably linked for Cage, penetrating to the extent that almost always aesthetic choices are determined by the life situations, and not vice versa. They also shape by what might be called the world view of creator, but also his attitude and moral life. During writing, I used David Revill’s competent biography The Roaring Silence: John Cage - A Life, which, irrespective of magnitude of the accumulated evidence of the source material remains a proof of almost crystalline objectivity of the author: as when he describes the lessons that Cage learned due to difficult experiences of an emotional crisis period (due to personal problems) and financial collapse (which is related to the economic crisis of 1930s America and the hardships of war). From this period: “lesson of acceptance” and “practice of patience” in relation to own emotions - at first just as exuberant, as unfulfilled - in relation to the world and the people, sounds and musical material (supported by the idea explained to him by G. Sarabhai: “to sober and quiet the mind”) - became the guiding motto in Cage’s life. In the shape of subsequent aesthetic assumptions, the deficit in talent and “staying in line”, were also reflected in almost all the components of the Cage’s concept of art such as acting to overcome both his own individual limitations, and the entire former Western aesthetic paradigm.
My work consists of five chapters, introduction and conclusion. It also contains a time line of John Cage’s life, bibliography of Cage’s writings, titles of major critical studies and the remaining critical bibliography. In the first chapter At the basis of avant-garde. Some facts from the history of aesthetics from Kant to Cage in the context of an aesthetic nature of art (with music in the background), raises the question of the status of contemporary aesthetics and the adequacy of its categories for the description of contemporary art. To introduce the reader to the problems of aesthetics, I present Kant’s conception of beauty and Hegel’s and Schelling’s concept of art in the context of a dispute about the aesthetic nature of art (A. Danto, G. Dickie). Then, I present Nietzsche’s concept of art with particular emphasis on Wagner’s impact, all in relation to the fundamental dilemmas of creative individual in the modern era. In the next part I describe the avant-garde revolution, which took place in the play first half of the twentieth century in relation to theoretical propositions of Dewey, Adorno, and Bauman. In the second chapter In Schoenberg’s circle: the source of new music, I present the history of acquaintance between the creator of dodecaphony and Cage and the reasons for their separation in connection with the concept of expressionist art, taking into account the position of anti expressionistic Popper, and all this in the context of opposition of tonality to atonality and the uniquely American category of “experimental action”. The third chapter From sound to noise, from noise to silence. Formation of a new aesthetic of music by John Cage, I present the assumptions of Cage’s first manifest Future of Music: Credo, the impact of development of American civilization on aesthetic of his early ideas, the relation of Cage to Futurism, the concept of noise as an integral component of music in the context of twentieth- century discoveries in the field of electro-acoustics, psychology of the new perception, lying at the basis of the Listening to music manifesto, the concept of “music of all sounds” and “music of all time” as well as Cage’s understanding of time in the context of ontological discontinuity of the universe of sounds, and essential for his aesthetics of music, the term “indeterminacy of the composition.” In the fourth chapter Between art and experience, I describe the sequence of events from the biography of Cage, which had a direct influence on the shaping of his conception of art, in respect to the development of technology, artist’s creative and emotional crisis, relationships (including social) with abstract expressionism and discovering the silence for music. In the fifth chapter Philosophy and the aesthetic dimension of the work of John Cage, I present his views in the context of the anti-platonism position (Nietzsche, B. Fuller), a dispute between modernism and the avant-garde, and also in relation to the pragmatist concept of aesthetic experience (Dewey), the time and the sublime categories (Beckett, Lyotard), the concepts of fear and chance (Heidegger, Sartre), the experimental action and chance (W. Welsch, M. Eldred), the concept of demilitarization of language and a new philosophy of reception (Derrida), and in the context of Eastern thought (Suzuki), anarchist and apolitical nature of art (Thoreau, Artaud), Marxist criticism (C. Cardew) and the philosopher-artist category (J.-N. Vuarnet).""
trans. Magda Gziut

Public art, unlike works of art created for galleries and museums, is often cast by well-meaning artists and curators into situations that make it vulnerable to the vicissitudes and vagaries of urban planners and civic administrators. Without clearly documented roles of ownership and responsibility, public artworks are unshielded from inevitable changes in taste, personnel and municipal priorities. Public art commissioned by biennales is especially prone to neglect, as its artist and curator "parents" unsurprisingly move on to make way for the next biennale's exhibition team. The Joseph Beuys tree commissioned for the 1984 Biennale of Sydney is a case in point.

Abstract

Beuys es el heredero directo de toda la tradición del Idealismo y el arte Romántico del Centro y el Norte de Europa. En su educación serán fundamentales las lecturas de Novalis, Holderlin, Schiller, Jean Paul, Tieck, Nietzsche, Hegel, Kierkegaard y más tarde el teósofo y educador Rudolf Steiner, auténtica columna vertebral de sus teorías sociales que ya había influenciado poderosamente a otros artistas de esta tradición romántica como Kandinsky. A lo largo de su itinerario, Joseph Beuys  pretendió acabar con la idea del arte como una práctica aislada para configurar un concepto “ampliado” del arte , abriendo el horizonte de la creatividad más allá del ghetto del arte.

Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca

Het lichaam als auto-topie. Een zoektocht naar God in het lichaam. Een onderzoek in stappen naar de betekenis van het feit  dat wij de werkelijkheid lichamelijk waarnemen en duiden.

In dit essya onderzoek ik de relatie tussen wereldbeeld, zelfbeeld en het lichaam. De ervaring van de werkelijkheid via het lichaam staat centraal. Grenservaringen zoals oorlogen, marteling, depressie en zelfdoding werpen licht op de ervaring van de werkelijkheid vanuit het lichaam. Hetl ichaam is ook de plaats waar het zelf van de mens zich manifesteert. Om dit uit te drukken heb ik het begrip auto-topie bedacht, het lichaam als zelfplaats. Wat betekent het dat dit lichaam voortdurend in nieuwe situaties, heterotopieën komt en wat doet dat met de beleving van het lichaam en het zelf? Welk licht werpen deze situaties op de ervaring van en de betekenisgeving van de wereld en het beeld van de wereld? Deze vragen passeren de revue en vanuit verschillende posities wordt een poging ondernomen om hier een antwoord op te vinden. Ook de vraag naar het goddelijke in het lichaam speelt hierbij een belangrijke rol. Aandacht voor taal, kunst en de bijbel in relatie tot het lichaam en de beleving van het lichaam complementeren dit essay. Edmond Jabès,  Josef Beuys en het lichaam van Jezus worden in drie excursies besproken en geduid. Een serie van gedichten begeleidt de tekst en vormt zo een apart discours met een eigen betekenis.


Abstract
Object of this essay is the human body: body as a kind of space in the sense of ‘res extensa’ (Descartes). My hypothesis is that the human body is the first and most real object we can know and experience. The experience of the body determinates the condition for all kinds of perception with this body. Therefore I’m starting to think about the world and the human self from the perspective of the body. The relationship between body, world and self is visualized in a new concept: auto-topy, the self who lives in the body. The body is the topos for the self. Auto-topy is a construct I invented in addition to the heterotopy of Michel Foucault. This self has a view on the world and on itself.
What it means to live in a body, in a heterotopic and heterochronic world, is shown in extreme situations like war, torture, mental illness like depression and suicide. After I have written about these conditions I concencentrate on the self in the body in the wide range of extermination of this body up to caring for the body and the treatment of the body like a God, as if God lives in it.
I describe three domains where the self and the body are the guest stars: language, art and the bible. At the end I take some conclusions. Three excursions complete this essay: about Edmond Jabés (language), Joseph Beuys (art) en Jezus Christ (bible).

Abstract

Beuys es el heredero directo de toda la tradición del Idealismo y el arte Romántico del Centro y el Norte de Europa. En su educación serán fundamentales las lecturas de Novalis, Holderlin, Schiller, Jean Paul, Tieck, Nietzsche, Hegel, Kierkegaard y más tarde el teósofo y educador Rudolf Steiner, auténtica columna vertebral de sus teorías sociales que ya había influenciado poderosamente a otros artistas de esta tradición romántica como Kandinsky. A lo largo de su itinerario, Joseph Beuys  pretendió acabar con la idea del arte como una práctica aislada para configurar un concepto “ampliado” del arte , abriendo el horizonte de la creatividad más allá del ghetto del arte.
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca.

Die visuelle Semiotik ist ein neues Wissenschaftsgebiet, das vielfältige Wurzeln hat.1 Entsprechend gibt es eine Vielfalt von Ansatz- und Schwerpunkten, von denen die Darstellung ausgehen kann. In diesem Buch versuche ich, dieser Vielfalt ge- recht zu werden, d.h. es wird eine Gesamtdarstellung, wenn möglich eine Synthese angestrebt. Damit unterscheidet sich das Buch von Ansätzen, die einseitig in der Sprachwissenschaft/ Rhetorik, der traditionellen Kunstgeschichte oder der philoso phischen Ästhetik, der Medientheorie oder gar der Kunstpsychologie und -soziolo- gie ihren Schwerpunkt setzen. Die bisherige visuelle Semiotik wird außerdem um zwei Gesichtspunkte erweitert, die sich aus der Konzeption einer dynamischen Se- miotik ergeben. Die neuen Gesichtspunkte betreffen erstens Aspekte der Morpho genese und Selbstorganisation, d.h. jede Zeichenstruktur erhält Form und Inhalt in einem Prozess, den man metaphorisch eine Morphogenese (in Bezug zur Biologie) oder eine Semiogenese nennen kann. Wenn eine Vielzahl zusammenwirkender Ge- staltungsprozesse vorliegt, spricht man auch von Selbstorganisation. Die Gegen- begriffe sind Chaos oder endlose Fraktalisierung, d.h. die Auflösung einfacher Ord- nungen. Entsprechend kann jedes Produkt einer Zeichenerzeugung (einer Semioge- nese) auf seinen Erzeugungsprozess und die dort wirkenden Gesetzmäßigkeiten be- fragt werden. Dies unterscheidet unseren Zugang dramatisch vom klassischen Strukturalismus (etwa bei de Saussure oder Chomsky). Dort werden solche Erklärungen für aussichtslos gehalten und es wird versucht, jede Struktur aus sich selbst oder aus zeitlosen (z.B. logischen) Gesetzen zu erklären.2 Natürlich sind die Mög- lichkeiten einer Rekonstruktion der Genese häufig begrenzt, aber überall dort, wo ein plausibler Ansatz möglich ist, muss diese Fährte verfolgt werden. Dies führt zum zweiten Charakteristikum unseres Ansatzes, der Thematisierung der Ur sprungsfrage und der Berücksichtigung evolutionärer Vorgänge und Gesetzmäßig keiten. Für die Sprache ist dieser Ansatz in Wildgen (2004a) und in weiteren Detail- arbeiten ausgeführt worden, wobei die Sprache immer im Konzert anderer symbolischer Formen, wie Mythos, Technik, Kunst gesehen wird. Die parallele und koor- dinierte Evolution der symbolischen Formen (im Sinne Cassirers) verbindet die vi- suelle Semiotik mit der sprachlichen und diese Interaktion wird in Kap. 10 auch zum Thema.
In manchen Werken zur visuellen Semiotik stehen entweder das Bild (in der Kunst), das Design, die Buchillustration (siehe etwa Kress und van Leuuwen, 1996), Computergrafiken oder Computerspiele oder andere Teilfelder der visuellen Umwelt im Vordergrund. Mir war es ein Anliegen, die ganze Breite des visuellen Zeichenrepertoires zu erfassen, von der Handskizze eines Höhlenmalers bis zur klassischen Kunst und der Kunst des 20. und 21. Jh., von der Skulptur der Steinzeit bis zur klassischen und modernen Architektur und zum Städtebau. Dabei steht die Alltagskultur neben raffinierten, in einer langen Tradition verankerten Kunstwerken (siehe das Sujet des Abendmahls in Kap. 3.1). Generell wird eine Analyse der For- menvielfalt (der Morphologie im Sinne Goethes) bezweckt und es wird eine an schauliche und alltagsweltlich plausible Beschreibung und Erklärung angestrebt. Auf diesem Hintergrund werden, auch unter Heranziehung von mit dem Kunstwerk zeitgenössischen Theoretisierungen (siehe zu Leonardo Kap. 3.1 und 3.2), weiter- reichende Hypothesen gebildet, die bevorzugt auf Prinzipien der Gestaltwahr- nehmung, der Semiogenese und der Selbstorganisation zurückgreifen.

Joseph Beuys’ installation Plight (1985) forcefully avows the Nazi genocide by means of negative presentation. The work culminates a collective artistic investigation of negative sculptural strategies for representing traumatic history, opened by the Nouveaux Realistes under the impact of Alain Resnais’ documentary film Nuit et Brouillard. This article for Nordic Journal of Aesthetics outlines this history and analyzes Plight in the context of the ‘after Auschwitz’ crisis of representation and traditional culture theorized by Theodor W. Adorno. For Adorno, Auschwitz demonstrated threats to autonomous subjectivity posed by tendencies unfolding within the global social process of modernity itself. Reflecting on the fate of music, poetry and literature under these conditions, Adorno advocated a hermetic art of silence and dissonance, as exemplified by Paul Celan and above all Samuel Beckett. This article shows that in the visual arts, too, the genocidal violence of World War II was confronted with analogous strategies of indirection. In Plight, Beuys would successfully synthesize John Cage’s symbolic demolitions of traditional music and the investigations of negative presentation carried out in sculpture by Arman and Daniel Spoerri.
keywords Beuys,Negativepresentation,Adorno

Joseph Beuys e Lucrezia De Domizio - De Rerum Natura è un libro scritto da Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, architetto, urbanista, fotografo e compositore che ha collaborato per molti anni con John Cage e Merce Cunningham. Il libro è una raccolta di 33 testi scritti da Pimenta in oltre 30 anni di collaborazione in progetti comuni con Lucrezia De Domizio, Baronessa Durini. Il libro rivela non solo molte tracce dell'opera e del pensiero di Beuys, non conosciute dalle persone in generale, ma anche dettagli dell'intensa collaborazione tra la Baronessa italiana e l'artista tedesco. Il libro conta anche foto rare, alcune delle quali fatti dal Barone Durini, marito di Lucrezia, scienziato amico di Beuys. Invitato dal Barone e dalla Baronessa Durini, Joseph Beuys ha vissuto parte dei suoi ultimi anni di vita sulle montagne italiane, in Abruzzo, in una piccola casa in un borgo medievale chiamato Bolognano. La vita di Beuys in Italia è anche l'argomento del libro di Pimenta - una celebrazione ai cento anni di Joseph Beuys.

German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) became world-renowned in the 1960s and 1970s for his performances, sculptural works and political activities. He was, however, a prolific producer of drawings from the beginning of his career in 1945, when, after fighting in the Second World War, he first decided to become an artist. In 1984, towards the end of his life, he told Bernice Rose of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, ‘Drawing is the first visible form in my works ... the changing point from the invisible powers to the visible thing’. To the viewer, Beuys’s drawings appear at first sight as highly idiosyncratic demonstrations of his manipulation of materials into line, form and texture.
Applying a methodology based on new materialist ideas, this paper challenges the notion that drawings are simply a spontaneous representation of the artist’s thoughts and closely examines Beuys’s drawings in the context of European cultural history. It will ask: How did Beuys react to past conceptions of stylistic formation when developing his own manner of drawing? What role did past traditions of drawing play in his self-positioning within contemporary draughtsmanship? Can Beuys’s innovative use of form and materials be placed now (retrospectively) in an historical continuum of drawing tradition?
The paper will be illustrated with selected examples of Beuys’s drawings from the Tate and National Galleries of Scotland ARTIST ROOMS collection, which are the subject of the author’s current research

Este trabalho apresenta uma investigação sobre o indeterminismo na música, a partir da análise de três obras musicais que utilizam processos de indeterminação como elementos estruturais. Partindo de uma contextualização das práticas e tendências musicais que enfatizam o fenômeno da indeterminação, é feita uma reflexão filosófica sobre o papel da experiência na música aleatória e experimental, enfatizando a importância da idéia de novidade e sua associação com o acaso. A poética compositiva e o aspecto virtual da forma são as bases sobre as quais se fundamentam as análises das peças.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE: poética, indeterminação, fenomenologia, música experimental

ABSTRACT

This work presents an inquiry on indeterminism in music, based on the analysis of three musical works that use indeterminacy processes as structural elements. A philosophical reflection on the role of experience in aleatory and experimental music is made after an oversight of the musical practices and tendencies that emphasize the indeterminacy phenomenon. The concept of “new” and its relationship with chance are also explored. The compositional poetics and the virtual aspect of form are the basis on which are founded the analyses of the pieces.

KEYWORDS: poetics, indeterminacy, phenomenology, experimental music

Joseph Beuys term “Soziale Plastik" not only classified his own artistic practice as essentially sculptural but, more importantly, it allowed him to thematize its heterogenous relationships to art market, exhibition, museum, and various modes of reception, and to stake its political claim. A close analysis of Beuys’s contribution to the 1977 documenta, “Honey Pump at the Workplace,” reveals 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 a “neoavantgarde.” 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 avantgardes of the 20th 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. Many have sought to address this problem by tethering art to society in a shared “contemporaneity.” What would be the implications of recasting this relation of art and society as one of “plasticity”–with all the conceptual forcefulness presented in Catherine Malabou’s work?

Modern art remains a mystery because most people – including art critics and even artists themselves – are unable to see beyond the imprisoning confines of classical fine art. Everything is judged in terms of beauty and technical skill, when it should be viewed from a quite different perspective, namely that of the imaginative world that the modern artwork is a part of. Successful and authentic modern art is about creating worlds of the imagination - like a film, or a novel - only this time using different media. Modern artworks are like lobby cards and film stills to imaginative worlds, and they should not be seen as aesthetic ends-in-themselves. And for an artwork to be authentically artistic, as opposed to merely crafted, it must invoke a ‘strange and disturbing’ imaginative world, not a variant of the world we currently inhabit, as that world is the world of crafted and aesthetic objects.

About the Theme “The Healing Power of Art” Since the cave paintings around 30,000 years old, man always used art to create magic and illusions. Those paintings of wild animals presumed as the rituals before hunting, which helps to stay alive and get nourished. During antiquity Greeks used every kind of artistic activity as catharsis meaning purification and clarification. In ancient Egypt public drama theatres and music performed to heal and comfort the public. Music, dance, special costumes, and body paintings like tattoos had been used for recovery and wellness by Shamans, and other believers in different tribes from all over the world like America, Africa, and Australia. Six thousand years of history about using art in recovery had begun from middle Asian Turkic tribes, transported to Middle East and Muslim world over Asia Minor to the Balkans. The hospitals of Seljuk and Ottoman Dynasties from middle ages with special sections for using the power of art in healing can be seen along the geography. Human thinking and perception skills have brought many advantages and disadvantages. People collectively (ritual, dance, sound, image production, sense of belonging) and / or individually (psychological relaxation, getting away from the negative thoughts and feelings, concentrating on what they can achieve on their own) have found different ways to heal these difficulties by their personal efforts. In addition to individuals who are interested in art as a profession, who work and specialize in art, there are also people from different fields who prefer to relax by mixing and arranging colors, forms, brush strokes, gestures, movements, music notes, instruments, sounds, and letters. Different disciplines of art play an active role on a global and / or local scale as a recovering and reforming method to enable the society to move away from the dilemmas that the individual has fallen into, to breathe by giving a pause, to encourage the individual for transferring the negative to positive. The one-day International Art, Design Conference and Exhibition explores the many ways creative mind deals with social, physical, and environmental recovery by using the visual language and materials of art and design.

Resumen
En el arte conceptual la idea o concepto prima sobre la realización material de la obra y el mismo proceso —notas, bocetos, maquetas, diálogos— al tener a menudo más importancia que el objeto terminado puede ser expuesto para mostrar el origen y desarrollo de la idea inicial. La verdadera obra de arte es la idea.
El arte conceptual es un arte crítico y corrosivo, pone énfasis en lo mental, en la ideación de las obras, relegando en importancia su realización material o sensible. Junto a este reduccionismo de lo manual, existe en las obras de arte conceptual una hipervaloración del trabajo de arte, como una actividad reflexiva, tanto mental como experiencial.
Los artistas conceptuales abogan por un decidido rechazo de los aspectos mercantiles del consumo de arte y, al mismo tiempo, muchos de ellos intentaban imbricar su actividad artística en un contexto más amplio de preocupaciones sociales, ecológicas e intelectuales, por oposición a la producción de objetos diseñados según criterios utilitaristas y funcionales al establishment cultural.
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca

En el arte conceptual la idea o concepto prima sobre la realización material de la obra y el mismo proceso —notas, bocetos, maquetas, diálogos— al tener a menudo más importancia que el objeto terminado puede ser expuesto para mostrar el origen y desarrollo de la idea inicial. La verdadera obra de arte es la idea. El arte conceptual es un arte crítico y corrosivo, pone énfasis en lo mental, en la ideación de las obras, relegando en importancia su realización material o sensible. Junto a este reduccionismo de lo manual, existe en las obras de arte conceptual una hipervaloración del trabajo de arte, como una actividad reflexiva, tanto mental como experiencial. Los artistas conceptuales abogan por un decidido rechazo de los aspectos mercantiles del consumo de arte y, al mismo tiempo, muchos de ellos intentaban imbricar su actividad artística en un contexto más amplio de preocupaciones sociales, ecológicas e intelectuales, por oposición a la producción de objetos diseñados según criterios utilitaristas y funcionales al establishment cultural.