{"id":5593,"date":"2016-03-28T17:55:32","date_gmt":"2016-03-28T15:55:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pop-zeitschrift.de\/?p=5593"},"modified":"2016-03-28T17:55:32","modified_gmt":"2016-03-28T15:55:32","slug":"konsumrezension-maerzvon-luis-perez-oramas28-3-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uni-siegen.de\/pop-zeitschrift\/2016\/03\/28\/konsumrezension-maerzvon-luis-perez-oramas28-3-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Konsumrezension M\u00e4rzvon Luis P\u00e9rez-Oramas28.3.2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

Works of art and ordinary things. A commentary on Vil\u00e9m Flusser<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. In his discussion of a lecture series delivered by Vil\u00e9m Flusser in S\u00e3o Paulo during the late 1970s Rodrigo Maltez Novaes describes in broad terms the great semiotician’s grand thesis: \u00bbFlusser suggests that our times may be characterized by the term \u203aprogram\u2039, in the same way as the 16th<\/sup> century is loosely characterized by the term \u203avirtue\u2039, the 17th<\/sup> by \u203anature\u2039, the 18th<\/sup> by \u203areason\u2039 and the 19th<\/sup> by \u203aprogress\u2039\u00ab.<\/li>\n
  2. Flusser\u2019s lectures are emblematically representative of a 20th<\/sup> century thinker. But even as the 21st century has already set its colors as well as its array of dreads, one can think of \u00bbprogram\u00ab as our epochal characteristic, our collective \u00bbnotion-typos\u00ab (George Luk\u00e1cs), our fate.<\/li>\n
  3. \u00bbApparatus\u00ab, a term Flusser brilliantly discussed in his conferences, may be another possibility to delineate a collective-typos of today. From smart-phones to drones, from apps to clouds, contemporary anthropology attests that more than ever we are what we use, that we are becoming the gadgets which we use.<\/li>\n
  4. To what extent can contemporary aesthetics respond to such notions? Is there an \u203aaesthetic program\u2039? What is an \u203aaesthetic apparatus\u2039? An \u203aaesthetic apparatus\u2039 only exists in function of a program. To address such questions regarding our epochal \u203aaesthetic apparatus\u2039, we need to delve into its program, its regulatory system, its set of conditions.<\/li>\n
  5. The \u203aaesthetic program\u2039 is historically and specifically modern. It coincided historically with the rise of modern aesthetics, with the invention of a \u00bbspeculative theory of Art\u00ab (Jean-Marie Schaeffer) that was conceived under the spell of \u00bbreason\u00ab and \u00bbprogress\u00ab in the 18th<\/sup> and 19th<\/sup> centuries and finally ended up as an ideology in the 20th<\/sup> century: Art.<\/li>\n
  6. Flusser in \u00bbPost-History\u00ab: \u00bbWhat characterizes programs is the fact that they are systems in which chance becomes necessity. They are games in which every virtuality, even the least probable, will be realized of necessity if the game is played for a sufficiently long time.\u00ab<\/li>\n
  7. The ultimate goal of the \u203aaesthetic program\u2039 is the transformation of ordinary things into works of Art. Its most effective consequence is thus the Ready-Made. This truth was already at work in Goya\u2019s etchings, in Watteau\u2019s Cythera, in Turner\u2019s storms of light, in Blake\u2019s hallucinations of heaven. To paraphrase Foucault: if the Ready-Made is the \u203aaesthetic domaine\u2039 that accomplishes its program, all works of art produced under its premises constitute its \u00bbarcheological territory\u00ab.<\/li>\n
  8. By transforming ordinary things into works of art the \u203aaesthetic program\u2039 unceasingly feeds its apparatus, Art. But Art, as it becomes ideology, necessarily reaffirms and reproduces the difference between works of art and ordinary things. Because in every ideology \u2013 Marx dixit in \u00bbThe German Ideology\u00ab \u2013 \u00bbhumans and their relationships appear inverted, like in a camera obscura, this phenomenon responding to its own vital historical process, seemingly to the way objects inverted in our retinae correspond to their vital physical process.\u00ab<\/li>\n
  9. Art is a phantom, an illusion. Art is an ideal being, an attribution, a generic category to which any object, any ordinary thing will be set in comparison. Art is an ad-nauseam<\/em> endless and groundless paragone<\/em>.<\/li>\n
  10. As an \u203aaesthetic apparatus\u2039 at the end of its ideological contradiction, Art has contributed to an equalization between its void, empty continent and each and every object that can be labeled as such: as Art, as work of art. All tensions, disjunctions and disproportions between Art and works of art disappear, once works of art have become simple samples of Art.<\/li>\n
  11. Works of art as samples of Art neutralize themselves into a form of ideological annihilation, which is largely dominant, today, over the spectrum of the Art World.<\/li>\n
  12. The difference that Art as ideology produces between works of art and ordinary things belongs to the sociologic order of \u00bbdistinction\u00ab. This \u00bbdistinction\u00ab functions as separation and contributes to the establishment of hierarchies of judgment-value, therefore commodification and finally dissolution of any aesthetic value into market value.<\/li>\n
  13. The \u203aaesthetic apparatus\u2039, or Art, at the end of its ideological historical transformation, through the delusional and sociological production of \u203adistinction\u2039 between works of art and ordinary objects, at the paradoxical peak of their mutual tautological relationship, has become the very opposite vis-\u00e0-vis the \u203aaesthetic program\u2039 that happens to be its arkh\u00e8<\/em>: It continues to deal with ordinary things as works of art, but only to the extent that it reproduces again and again their absolute difference, their inconsolable \u203adistinction\u2039.<\/li>\n
  14. Can we truly avoid Art? Once the program has produced it \u2013 chance becoming necessity \u2013 is it inevitably our fate? If every material particle in the Universe has an antiparticle, their eventual contact must result in their annihilation. However, the world exists because matter and antimatter respond to slightly different laws. Metaphorically, Art can be said to be the antimatter of works of art. If they can follow a slightly different pace, they could escape the void of their ideological neutralization. This might result in a new \u00bbprogram\u00ab: de-ideologizing Art.<\/li>\n
  15. In order to dismantle the ideological dimension of Art, one could think of a post-artistic mission, a new \u203aaesthetic program\u2039 that transforms works of Art back into what they have always been: ordinary things.<\/li>\n
  16. The transformation of works of Art back into ordinary things will not be as simple a program as the transformation of ordinary things into works of art, like the Ready-Made. A program that transforms works of arts back into ordinary things will be an un-programmatic \u203aaesthetic program\u2039.<\/li>\n
  17. Works of art considered as nothing more than ordinary things will be marked by a temporal asymmetry vis-\u00e0-vis Art: They act in belatedness, their effect is slower, their endurance stronger, their duration longer than that of Art. Works of art as ordinary things are singularities. To avoid their annihilation as Art, we should invent modes of speaking and writing \u2013 this is our urgent un-programmatic \u203aaesthetic program\u2039 \u2013, that stress their incommensurable singularity, that allow us to conceive them as fields of agonistic tension, disproportion and undetermined differences, as realms for the unclassifiable, as things of beauty<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Luis P\u00e9rez-Oramas (born 1960 in Caracas) is a Venezuelan poet, art historian and curator. He is the author of eight poetry books, four essay collections and numerous museum catalogues. He directed the 30th<\/sup> Bienal de S\u00e3o Paulo (The Imminence of Poetics) of 2012 and the Brazilian pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennal. Since 2006 he works as The Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art in the Department of Drawings and Prints at MoMA, New York.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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