Post-Aesthetic Poetics? (2011), GCGCA(i)
Post-Aesthetic Poetics?
Museum of German Romanticism, Frankfurt
20 Mar - 20 Jun 2011
'A really free and cultivated person ought to be able to attune himself at will to being philosophical or philological, critical or poetical, historical or rhetorical, ancient or modern: quite arbitrarily, just as one tunes an instrument, at any time and to any degree.'
- Schlegel
Early Romanticism is characterised by its crossing and mutual transformation of literary and philosophical discourses, through which a new kind of discourse about art comes into being. In particular, its philosophical conception of the fragment is a philosophical modernism 'après la letter': it affirms the new, philosophically, as an imperative of presentation. Contemporary art is a post-aesthetic poetics.
The fragment is the central philosophical concept of early German Romanticism, in particular the experience of the work of art 'qua' fragment: a notion of the work of art as a medium for the transformation of a linear into a circular infinity of reflection; a conversion of the linear mathematical infinity of the 'series' of self-reflections of the subject into the 'circle' of the experience of a self-enclosed, because self-limiting, and thereby figuratively totalised, collection of fragments. Schlegel's concept of art criticism achieved for artworks a criterion of an immanent structure specific to the work itself - a theory of art as a medium of reflection and of the work as a center of reflection.
‘If finished works only become what they are because their being is a process of becoming, they are in turn dependent on forms in which their process crystallizes: interpretation, commentary, and critique. These are not simply brought to bear on works by those who concern themselves with them; rather they are the arena of the historical development of artworks in themselves, and thus they are forms in their own right. They serve the truth content of works as something that goes beyond them, which separates this truth content-the task of critique-from elements of its untruth. If the unfolding of the work in these forms is not to miscarry, they must be honed to the point where they become philosophical. It is from within, in the movement of the immanent form of artworks and the dynamic of their relation to the concept of art, that it ultimately becomes manifest how much art - in spite of, and because of, its monadological essence - is an element in the movement of spirit and of social reality’; ‘The truth content of artworks is the objective solution of the enigma posed by each and every one. By demanding its solution, the enigma points to its truth content. It can only be achieved by philosophical reflection’; ‘Artworks... await their interpretation.’
- Theodor Adorno
Post-Aesthetic Poetics? (2011), GCGCA(i)
