Between Aesthetics and the Concept: A Philosophical History of Contemporary Artistic Practices

This course begins from the assumption that Contemporary Art is post-conceptual in the sense that the philosopher Peter Osborne has described it, it utilises aesthetics primarily to communicate its conceptual contents. This development emerges with Conceptual art and changes the ontology of art itself. But what are the stakes in this transformation? How have the philosophical realms of aesthetics and rationalism developed, and how have they intersected with artistic development? And perhaps more importantly, what do aesthetics and cognitive approaches to art offer to critical or politically engaged artistic practices? Beginning from Kant this course will quickly trace the origins of aesthetic and cognitive understandings and approaches to art, focussing on their philosophical elaboration, but also looking at their artistic applications. The course’s focus however, will be on twentieth and twenty-first century philosophy and art, and in particular on how aesthetic and conceptual practices are, or should be, intertwined today. To do so we will consider ideas from Joseph Kosuth, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou, Speculative Realism and Francois Laruelle, amongst others.

 

13.03  Introduction:  Post-Conceptual art and the change in art’s ontology

20.03  Immanuel Kant: the schematism and aesthetics

Reading: From The Critique of Pure Reason (the schematism), and Critique of Judgment (the sublime)

 

2 weeks Easter break

 

10.04  Hegel: idealism, art and the dialectic

Reading: From Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit and Lectures on Aesthetics

17.04  German Romanticism: Schiller and Fichte

Reading: From Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man and Fichte, The Science of Knowing (Wissenschaftslehre)

24.04  Peter Osborne: post-conceptual art, critical theory and history

Reading: From Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, Philosophy of Contemporary Art

 

1st May Labor Day holiday

 

08.05 American Post-War Art: Jung, Existentialism, Phenomenology

Reading: From Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception

15.05 Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Kosuth: Art qua Concept

Reading: Joseph Kosuth, ‘Art After Philosophy’

22.05  Gilles Deleuze: art as a sublime event

Reading: From Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

29.05  Francois Laruelle: non-art

Reading: From Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, A Non-Standard Aesthetics

05.06  Speculative Realism: Quintin Meillassoux and Amanda Beech

Reading: From Meillassoux, After Infinitude: And Essay on the Necessity of Finitude, Beech, ‘Concept Without Difference: The Promise of the Generic’

12.05  Jacques Ranciere: aesthetics, concepts, and politics

Reading: Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics

19.05  Aesthetics and Concepts in contemporary artistic practices

 

* Readings will be uploaded to the Cloud at least a week before the lectures

Students will be expected to follow the readings provided, and write a short engagement with one of them, as well as a longer essay dealing with a theme of the course. Essays can be written in English or German.