The subscription to KAPSULA, which is organized as an email listserv (so you register with your email and then get the publication delivered) is free and of course I highly recommend you subscribe at once! The thematic sequence for this series is “Longing,” and the archive of other topics such as “Bad History” and “Acting Up” is on the magazine’s website.
In the article, using an iteration of Hal Foster’s Nachträglichkeit from The Return of the Real (1996), I tell how Franz Marc’s ideas about paradise and our separation from animals reignites in the 2009 Venice Biennale installation Reading Dante by Joan Jonas and the video by Lee Lennox for the Presets’ EDM song “Girl and the Sea.”
After I wrote the article it occurred to me that I had not explained why I discussed the works out of chronology, “Girl and the Sea” from 2004 after Reading Dante from 2009. The reason is because I actually saw the Jonas first, and then the Presets video. For… reasons…the video really upset me, but it also gave me some knowledge about myself, and, more importantly, “activated” the connection between Reading Dante and Marc’s Paradies.
As I say in the article this idea has been churning inside me for awhile, and I am so grateful to KAPSULA and particularly to editor Lindsay LeBlanc for giving these ideas a polished voice and a beautifully-designed forum.
There were opportunities during Isabelle Graw’s presentation this past week at the Lenbachhaus to make some some site-specific comments about the collections at hand, and Graw did make tangential connections to work by Joseph Beuys and Wolfgang Tillmans, thought not those which belongs to the museum’s Kunst Nach 1945 collection.
Intensely and yet breezily theoretical (I have heard Graw speak several times, on one of those occasions dismissing the Adorno-Horkheimer ‘culture industry’ works most art historians spend their lives trying to understand as insufficiently complex for her needs in explaining the reification of art) Graw is an engaging speaker, readily admitting that many of her contentions create oppositional paradoxes which thus cannot be argued against. Graw herself occupies dual roles, as professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt am Main and as an art critic and co-founder of Texte zur Kunst, the respectable but for-profit Berlin art journal. Graw also has a heavy amount of street cred coming from a lengthy association with Martin Kippenberger during Kippenberger’s time in Cologne.
Her talk at the Lenbachhaus, Malerei als indexikalisches Medium in der neuen Ökonomie recasts the idea that paintings are “alive” somehow in the sense that they emanate an autonomous value in terms of the role of Painting with a “P” as both commodity and part of the larger “organism” of the process and documentation of the making of art.
Indexical is a word mostly associated in art history with photography, and photography is important to Graw’s current interest, which expands upon many of the ideas she raised in her recent book High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture in the sense that “documentary indexicality” is all but a de-facto given the ubiquity of record-making technology. Additionally, in the trinity of “icon/index/symbol,” “index” marks a definite place and time by compelling a reaction in the beholder. But I think it is the more abstruse “referential indexicality” that most interests Graw in this sense, as she used Diedrich Diedrichsen’s term “Selbstdarsteller” to describe Kippenberger’s performances of himself as himself (as opposed to performing “the other” or just “being” himself).
s organized as an email listserv (so you register with your email and then get the publication delivered) is free and of course I highly recommend you subscribe at once! The thematic sequence for this series is “Longing,” and the archive of other topics such as “Bad History” and “Acting Up” is on the magazine’s website.
