Aesthetics of Power
Screentshot of Amir Yatziv work “Superstition in the Pigeon”, 2013
Art and power go hand in hand along the whole period of the history of civilisation.
Aesthetics was employed by the institutions of authority, political and religious, for communication of ideology. Mystification of power provided obedience, loyalty and stability of political order for thousands of years. In Ancient Egypt pharaohs and Roman emperors associated themselves with gods, European royalty was ‘blessed’ by institutionalised in church mystical social order. Aesthetics provided essential grounding and served political authority until the art individualised its impact and turned into independent political actor itself. Malevich called for revolution in visual perception in the Manifesto of Suprematism, while Bertolt Brecht tried to politicise art in order to turn it into an active agent of social change. Suddenly aesthetics earned the position of freedom from the narrative of political contextualisation.
Curated by Denis Maksimov, the programme “Aesthetics of Power” features a selection of notable works from both of these subjective periods of aesthetico-political dialogue. The first part of the programme features notable artworks and masterpieces that represent the period when glorification of political power was an essential function of artistic production. The second part features the contemporary video artworks that challenge the position of political institutions and power hierarchies via calling the viewers to contemplate on the very essence of the socio-political system we are inhabiting.
Participating artists: Amir Yatziv, Sara Tirelli and Elena Mazzi, Caterina Pecchioli and Benjamin Verhoeven
Watch the trailer here
Do You Speak Synergy?
group exhibition at Harlan Levey Projects gallery curated by Denis Maksimov with support of Harlan Levey
Emmanuel Van Der Auwera. “Cabinet d’affects” (2010), exhibition view
In his essay “Cézanne’s Doubt,” l French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes Cézanne’s impressionistic and paradoxical approach to painting, and implicitly draws a parallel to his own concept of radical reflection. Looking at the relationship between science and art in the context of Cezanne’s struggle to apply “intelligence, ideas, sciences, perspective, and tradition” to his work, he concludes that theory and practice stand in opposition to each other. He sees art as an attempt to capture an individual’s perception, and science as anti-individualistic. From this perspective, natural science cannot grasp the profundity and subjective depth of the phenomena it endeavors to explain.
Ella Littwitz. “Uproot” (2015), exhibition view
Art and science may indeed oppose each other in certain senses, but they also share many things, for example a vigorous research drive that goes beyond practicality. In the currents of contemporary cultural discourse, this characteristic is becoming challenging to maintain, for science and art alike. “Key performance indicators” are applied literally to everything, including the traditionally metaphysical subjects of love and death. Art risks leaning towards the language of “social engagement” in regard to state funding, falling into categories of purely utilitarian design or vanity symbols for luxurious consumption. Science, on the other hand, is getting cornered exclusively into the “applied” category. This process is not a novelty: with constant re-learning and easy forgetting, valuable insights and original perspectives are often lost in favor of the “mode du jour” – sometimes by chance, sometimes in result of deliberate decisions by dominating institutions of a particular time.
Imposed planning and bureaucracy turn both artist and scientist into “eternal applicants” for grants rewarded to visionaries for design “solutions.” Research, findings, and output of each are quickly translated to market speak: Where is the business case? What is the product? Is there a customer for this? How are you going to promote it? The discourse of market economy is perhaps the most crippling enemy poetry has ever seen.
Benjamin Verhoeven. “Sculptural Movement, chapters I & II” (2015), still from video
Both art and science resist. Fundamental scientific research eludes pressure by forecasting long-term outcomes to illustrate a future where we’re all dead already anyway, and artistic energy continues to insist on the power of purposelessness in unveiling the truth content in art and commodities in general. A growing number of collaborations between artists and scientists, formed under the flag of “artistic research” firmly establish a vocabulary for this discourse. Following the logic of Merleau-Ponty, “Do You Speak Synergy?” aims to “return to phenomena.” It does this through a transdisciplinary conversation about the poetic essence of scientific and artistic investigation. The notion of “transdisciplinary” investigation is used more and more often in discussions about the future of research. However, the pathway towards meta-levels of inquiry is not so straightforward. Research has become the victim of an obsession with efficiency, predictability and target driven utilitarianism.
Haseeb Ahmed. “Fish Bone Chapel” (2013), exhibition view
The selected artists share the research language of transdisciplinary inquiry while remaining free from any disciplinary or corporate mandates. Modern physics calls this their “unified field,” ² which we refer to as “synergy,” where fundamental forces and elementary particles are approached as if they compose a single field – a field of truly universal language.
References:
¹ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le doubt de Cézanne” in Sens et non-sens, Gallimard, Paris, 1945. English translation by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus in Sense and Non-Sense, Illinois University Press, Chicago, IL, 1964.
² Peter Weibel, Beyond Art: A Third Culture. – A Comparative Study in Culture and Science in 20th Century Austria and Hungary. Passagen Verlag, Vienna, 1997.
pdf version of the book “Do You Speak Synergy?” co-written by Denis Maksimov and Harlan Levey
more images from the exhibition