Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Band 51. Heft 2

The concept and central place ›work of art‹ has been neglected by the turn to aesthetic experience. But the work of art cannot be grasped fully by the act of aesthetic experience; it is rather a place, where the essential relation between aesthetic and existential experience becomes known. The work of art is mere potentiality, which appears in the actuality of aesthetic experience. Beyond the difference of potentiality and actuality, object and subject, the work of art exists in the ontological mode of can-being, of being open to the world.

Fascination and horror are two key experiences that are present particularly in the early work of Anselm Kiefer. Particularly in Germany these have prompted surprisingly strong reactions. Why is it, that his work dealing with the National Socialism has been received so ambivalently? The answer to this question, the text attempts, is based on the analysis of the pictures’ conditions of impact, their „Wirkkraft“. It can be shown that the process of perception can be understood as forming the basis of a decision. This becomes apparent in the picture’s effects and people’s varying reactions to them, depending on their cultural background. Disclosing this connection makes recognizable the force of the pictures, thus opening a path to questioning it. Moreover, this disclosure leads to a description of the phenomenon as a specifically post-modern.

In this article, we offer a systematic description of intermedia relations across music, literature, the visual arts, and film. Beginning with some general reflections on materiality and medium in these diverse fields of art, we then offer various examples consisting of two media (e.g. music film, song, images in writing). We pursue the question if, and how, one of the two media may take priority over the other. In our conclusion, we deal with „intermedia relations in monomediality“. This section focuses on artistic representations made in one medium, but based on reflections on another medium. For instance, this is the case when a novelist writes about a picture without having this picture reprinted in the text.

In the history of its reception, the myth of Medea has always been of prime importance for reflections on an awareness of civilization crisis. This process culminates in the modern age, and especially so with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s exceptionally significant version of the Medea story. Pasolini’s far-seeing and complex poetics of cinema combines the ancient myth with sources drawn from the history of religions and thereby exposes the concept of social naturalness as ideologically posited. Against an ideology of the allegedly natural, his „Medea“ brings to bear an ethnoaesthetic mythography, which casts doubt on the postulate of the progress of civilization. To be sure, in the context of modernism, a rehabilitation of religious myth is impossible except in a mode of aesthetic illusion. But it is the fiction of ›mythopoiesis‹ which assures that such an enterprise can make sense, if only in an imaginary way.

The following article deals with the arc shot camera technique, which is often dismissed as stylistic play (as the famous director of photography Michael Ballhaus, for instance, has argued). The article will have a look at three films – „Vertigo“, „Casualties of War“, and „Lola rennt“ (›Run Lola, Run‹) – to explore the often underrated aesthetic potential of the arc shot device. My thesis is that we better understand the aesthetic function of camera technique if we view the arc shot in terms of its interplay with the films' underlying system of semiotic codes.