Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Band 55. Heft 1

This paper seeks to examine the relation between Kant’s aesthetic theory and the philosophy of Enlightenment. My study will focus on two central aspects from the Critique of Judgment: In connection with the Analytic of the Sublime, I will argue that Kant’s discussion of the concept enabled the development of the opinion that experiencing the specifically modern artistic beauty works as a means to equip us with an awareness of ourselves as beings equipped with reason. The second aspect I want to discuss is that of the aesthetic ideas. I will show that in the Third Critique, the idea of experiencing artistic beauty functions as a compensation for the pressure of rationality that sets in together with modernity in the 18th century.

Eine einzige der Spezialästhetiken, nämlich die Poetik, kann versuchen, mit der Kunst zu wetteifern, die sie thematisiert, indem sie selbst in poetisch schöner Form erklärt, was gute Dichtung ist, und damit die Normen instantiiert, die sie lehrt. Die klassische Weise, dies zu tun, ist das Lehrgedicht – sowohl Boileaus L’Art Poétique als auch Alexander Popes An Essay on Criticism werden als paradigmatische Beispiele des Genres des poetologischen Lehrgedichtes gedeutet. Nach dem Niedergang dieses Genres versucht Friedrich Schlegel das Fragment und den romantischen Dialog als neue Formen poetisch anspruchsvoller Literaturtheorie einzuführen. Adornos Ästhetische Theorie schließlich ist zwar ein Traktat, weist aber jene Dissonanz selbst auf, die ihm zufolge das Wesen moderner Kunst ausmacht. Damit freilich erweist sich Harmonie als auf der Metaebene unvermeidlich.

While studies on literary intermediality are evidently experiencing an upward trend, the poetological key question of how to understand the iconicity of the poetic text, remains mostly unthought. The present study draws up a research program that investigates the question of the image under the conditions of poetic textuality. It thereby creates a notion of the image which disengages itself from the discursive formation of visibility and which is incorporated in a theory of the text beginning with Roman Jakobson. The poetic text is determined as a composite of both iconic poiesis and iconic criticism (Bildkritik).

The art of the modern age, particularly the lyric poetry, develops an own aesthetic conception of the movement which breaks with the classic idea of the movement as a spatial change of a body in time. Baudelaires À une Passante, Rimbauds Bateau ivre and Paul Valérys Le Cimetière Marin are three paradigmatic texts of the French modern age, in which movement is reflected as a time-space-continuum and materialized in the dynamic of language. Modern art is itself movement and causes movement. It becomes an art of the development, not sub- stance, an art of pure sensory perception, not concept, an art of discontinuous adventures, not experience.

The relation between film and philosophy is a relation marked by tensions. The article’s aim is to unfold these tensions and to fathom them out. The figure of Wittgenstein as a philosopher and film spectator serves as a leitmotif throughout the course of the argument. Following the lines based in this motif, the philosophical unavailability of film becomes apparent. In order to understand what we mean by film and do with films, a specific aesthetic perspective is essential. This means, in particular, that film is to be understood within the practice of art. Eventually the author presents approaches to such a view in short conceptual reflections.

In parallel to their monumental installations, which were built in the Western and South- western deserts of the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of representatives of American Land Art have also produced works on film. Researchers have held divergent views about the importance of these films for the understanding of the installations and about their character as either independent works or mere documentations. This article takes a different approach and analyses an element common to both installations and films: the critique of conventional constructions of illusionistic space. The repudiation of conventional spatial structures and of the representation of perspective is discussed on the basis of works by Walter De Maria and Robert Smithson. A formal analysis demonstrates that the films go beyond merely showing the conception of space in Land Art installations. Instead, they perform a similar critique of conventional ideas of space with decidedly cinematic techniques.

It is the outstanding characteristic of the works of David Claerbout to be situated in an essentially ambivalent place between cinema and photography. Both practices are used – either individually or in combination – in a very individual way. The series of projections of installations, which is mapped out from Sections of a Happy Moment onwards (followed by Arena and The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy Moment), drives the confusion of motion and rest to the extreme of an undecidability, which is the result of the new imaging techniques that Claerbout uses.