Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic – Lecture by James Elkins
Sazmanab Project is proud to present an informal lecture by James Elkins, an art historian and art critic based in Chicago.
The topic is fundamental for the current practice of art: it concerns the continuing hold of an old dichotomy. The anti-aesthetic was first defined by Hal Foster in 1980; it denotes art that is made without explicit aesthetic purpose. Such art is often political, and usually interrogates gender, ethnicity, and other questions of identity. Meanwhile, modernist and late modernist art, which proposes an aesthetics, continues to be made. It’s the old choice between socially active art and work done by yourself in a studio. Despite man challenges and thirty years of new art, the dichotomy of the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic continues to offer no viable alternative except for adventitious and local experiments. The choice between the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic (including post modernisms, anti modernisms, alter modernity, institutional critique, etc.) continues to comprise one of the most fundamental choices for artists. The impasse is made more difficult by the proliferation of identity politics, which obscure other theories of meaning (for instance Slavoj Žižek and Gilles Deleuze), and it is made less negotiable by the hegemony of anti-aesthetics in academic discourse on art.
The lecture will highlight the current state of art theory in relation to this problem, and report on the forthcoming book.
The topic is fundamental for the current practice of art: it concerns the continuing hold of an old dichotomy. The anti-aesthetic was first defined by Hal Foster in 1980; it denotes art that is made without explicit aesthetic purpose. Such art is often political, and usually interrogates gender, ethnicity, and other questions of identity. Meanwhile, modernist and late modernist art, which proposes an aesthetics, continues to be made. It’s the old choice between socially active art and work done by yourself in a studio. Despite man challenges and thirty years of new art, the dichotomy of the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic continues to offer no viable alternative except for adventitious and local experiments. The choice between the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic (including post modernisms, anti modernisms, alter modernity, institutional critique, etc.) continues to comprise one of the most fundamental choices for artists. The impasse is made more difficult by the proliferation of identity politics, which obscure other theories of meaning (for instance Slavoj Žižek and Gilles Deleuze), and it is made less negotiable by the hegemony of anti-aesthetics in academic discourse on art.
The lecture will highlight the current state of art theory in relation to this problem, and report on the forthcoming book.
Lecture by James Elkins
Thursday, January 5, 2012 – 7-9pm
Admission is free
RSVP required. RSVP at RSVP(at)sazmanab.org
Limited seating on a first-come, first-served basis
