The design of surfaces, between empathy and new figuration

Nowadays design languages seem anew defined through images and figures that appear increasingly distant from abstraction. In the time that we live in, where it is prevailing a dominance of individual needs rather common desires, an abandon of abstraction in favour of new figuration, stimulates the opportunity to investigate a new dyad, ‘Project and Empathy’; these terms could summarize well the expanded modality of physical and psychological interaction between people – as individual – and artefacts, through the increasing role of surfaces. The whole world of postmodern image, especially through the digital technologies, tends to offer hyper realistic aesthetic simulacra, altered nature: this is the current world of extension of feelings and sense, in which we are immersed daily. This condition affect the approaches to design, which require a new thinking around technologies, method and tools from training to practice the activity of design: a new attitude for materiality of things, beyond the immateriality of digital reality

L'homme gothique contre l'homme classique. Huysmans, Worringer et l'héritage grec

International audienceJ.-K. Huysmans est connu pour son rejet du monde méridional et de la culture antique. Il incarne parfaitement "l'homme gothique", contre "l'homme classique", définis par Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965) dans "L'Art gothique" (1927)

The Aesthetics of Rudolf Steiner and Spiritual Modernism.

Around 1900, a wave of European artists and intellectuals turned to spiritual themes and modes of thought to reform a society perceived as dominated by rationalism, materialism and mimetic art. My dissertation places at the center of this movement Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925)—the Austrian philosopher, artist, architect, pedagogue and social reformer. I trace Steiner’s influence on canonical modernists and show that his writings are deeply resonant with contemporary developments in the visual arts, art theory and architecture. In Chapter One, I examine the influence of Steiner’s theory of dematerialization on Wassily Kandinsky’s conception of abstraction. While exploring significant points of connection between both thinkers, I argue that Steiner ultimately does not aim for abstraction but instead for a return to the phenomenological world in an immersive mode characteristic of Goethean thought. In Chapter Two, I bring Steiner's art historical theory into dialogue with the writings of the German art theorist Wilhelm Worringer and the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl. I argue that both Steiner and Riegl conceive of the history of art as the expression of a collective aesthetic drive, what Riegl calls Kunstwollen, and that Worringer and Steiner understand “abstraction” in philosophical rather than periodic terms. Chapter Three turns to Steiner's first Goetheanum building, placing it in the context of Expressionist architecture on the one hand and anti-war responses to the First World War on the other. I bring Steiner’s theory of the first Goetheanum as promoting peace into conversation with three contemporaneous thinkers and projects: Bruno Taut and his Glashaus Pavilion from 1914; the German fantasy writer and illustrator Paul Scheerbart; and Sigmund Freud’s 1915 anti-war text “Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod.” My project makes three interventions into the field of modernism studies. First, by considering Steiner's place within Expressionism, it adds to the heterogeneity of this movement. Second, it contributes to the neglected subfield of what I call "spiritual modernism," arguing that the spiritual was never historically “excluded” from the modern. Finally, my dissertation broadens our understanding of modernism by complicating traditional binaries such as religious/secular and pre-modern/modern.PHDGermanic Languages & LiteraturesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135829/1/jlcain_1.pd

La vie et la mort en peinture

L'abstraction visuelle ne constituerait pas d'abord une réflexion sur la nature du beau en soi, mais une approche cognitive renvoyant aux épistémologies et aux idéologies des époques où elle se manifeste. L'étude de différents discours tenus sur l'abstraction picturale au XIXe et au XXe siècles permet de suivre les valeurs attribuées à cette notion, notamment autour de l'opposition entre le vitalisme et la mort à partir des réflexions d'A. Riegl et W. Worringer. La différenciation entre l'abstrait et le concret, le sujet et l'objet se voit ainsi constamment relancée, dans la possibilité de leur réversibilité.Visual abstraction is not, at least not in the first place, a reflection upon the nature of beauty as such, but rather a cognitive approach to the world that bears witness to the epistemologies and ideologies of those periods of history where it appeared. The study of some of the discourses that have been held about pictural abstraction during the 19th and 20th centuries, notably the opposition between vitalism and death founded on the works of A. Riegl and W. Worringer, allows us to understand the various values that have been given to the notion. The distinction between abstraction and concreteness, subject and object, can here be seen, in regard to the possibility of their reversibility, as an ever-open question

Architectural forms and philosophical structures

Architectural Forms and Philosophical Structures examines architectural and architectonic forms as products of philosophical and epistemological structures in selected cultures and time periods, and analyzes architecture as a text of its culture. Relations between architectural forms and philosophical structures are explored in Western civilization, beginning in Egypt and Greece and culminating in twentieth-century Europe and America. Architecture, like all forms of artistic expression, is interwoven with the beliefs and the structures of knowledge of its culture. Keywords: architecture, philosophy, cosmology, Egypt, Greece, Francesco Borromini (Oratorio di San Filippo Neri, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, San Giovanni in Laterano), Guarino Guarini (Caelestis Mathematica, Euclides adauctus, Placita philosophica, San Lorenzo), Bernardo Vittone (Istruzioni diverse, Istruzioni elementari, Cappella della Visitazione, San Bernardino, San Gaetano, San Luigi, San Michele, Santa Chiara), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Discourse on Metaphysics, Eléments de philosophie cache, Letters to Arnauld, Letters to de Volder, The Monadology), Baroque, Gianbattista Piranesi (Antichità romane, Carceri, Fall of Phaethon, Grotteschi, Opere varie, Parare su l’Architettura), unconscious, Gothic, Gothic Romance, psychophysiological space, Sigmund Freud, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Georges Bataille, Frederick Kiesler (Endless House, Inside the Endless House), Accademia di San Luca, Leon Battista Alberti (De ludi matematici, De motibus ponderis, De re aedificatoria, Sant’Andrea in Mantua), Anaximander, Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica), Aristophanes, Aristotle (De anima, Metaphysics), Daniele Barbaro (La pratica della perspettiva), Georges Bataille (Le Coupable; Eroticism, Death and Sensuality; Inner Experience), Charles Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du Mal), William Beckford (Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents; Vathek; The Vision), Gianlorenzo Bernini (Cappella Cornaro, The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, Fountain of the Four Rivers), Ferdinando Galli Bibiena (Architettura civile), Umberto Boccioni (Unique Forms of Continuity in Space), Jacob Böhme (Theosophische Wercke), Orfeo Boselli (Osservazioni della Scultura Antica), Hermann Broch (The Sleepwalkers), Giordano Bruno (De triplici minimo, Lampas trigenta statuarum), Edmund Burke (A Philosophical Enquiry), Bernard Cache (Earth Moves), Roger Caillois (The Necessity of the Mind, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia”), Coop-Himmelblau (Rooftop Remodeling Prokect), Pietro da Cortona, Counter Reformation, Nicolas Cusanus (De Beryllo, De circuli quadratura, De coniecturis, De docta ignorantia, De Staticis Experimentis, De Visione Dei, Dialogue sur la pensée), Egnazio Danti (Le Due Regole della Prospettiva Pratica), Gilles Deleuze (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque), René Descartes (La Dioptrique), Marcel Duchamp (Le Grand Verre), Albrecht Dürer (Melancholia), Peter Eisenman (Cities of Artificial Excavation), Arthur Evans (Mycenean Tree and Pillar Cult), Marsilio Ficino (Corpus Hermeticum, De amore, De Christiana religione, Opera Omnia, Theologia Platonica), Robert Fludd (Microcosmic History), Henri Focillon (The Life of Forms in Art), Sigmund Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents, The Interpretation of Dreams, On Creativity and the Unconscious, On Dreams, The Problem of Anxiety, Totem and Taboo), Galileo Galilei, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Theory of Colors), Martin Heidegger (Poetry, Language and Thought), Hermann von Helmholtz (Treatise on Physiological Optics), Hermeticism, Hesiod (Theogony), Eva Hesse (Right After), Homer (Iliad, Odyssey), Horapollo (Hieroglyphica), Victor Hugo (Les rayons et les ombres), Carl Jung (Memories, Dreams and Reflections), Johannes Kepler, Athanasius Kircher (Arithmologia, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, Musurgia Universalis, Oedipi Aegyptiaci, Pamphili Obelisci, Phonurgia Nova, Primitiae Gnomonicae Catroptique, Prodromus Coptus Sive Aegyptiacus), Rosalind Krauss (The Optical Unconscious), Jacques Lacan (Écrits, The Ethics of Psycho-Analysis, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis), Ernst Mach (The Analysis of Sensations), Man Ray (Anatomies), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception), John Milton (Paradise Lost), Robert Morris (Blind Time, Continuous Project Altered Daily, Passageway), Alfred de Musset (Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle), Neoplatonism, Frederich Wilhelm Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals), Organic Rationalism, Ovid (Metamorphoses), Erwin Panofsky (Perspective as Symbolic Form, Studies in Iconology), Francesco Patrizi (Nova de universis philosophia), Phenomenology, Alessandro Piccolomini (De la sfera del mundo), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Heptaplus, Oration on the Dignity of Man), Plato (Laws, Phaedrus, Republic, Timaeus), Plotinus (Enneads), Edgar Allan Poe (“The Fall of the House of Usher”), Pseudo-Dionysius (Celestial Hierarchy, Epistles, Mystical Theology), Marquis de Puységur, Pythagoras, Thomas de Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium Eater), Renaissance, Arthur Rimbaud (“Après le deluge,” “Le bateau ivre,” “Les Ponts”), Martin del Rio (Disquisitionum magicarum), Cesare Ripa (Iconologia), Romanticism, Colin Rowe (The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal”), Sebastiano Serlio (Architettura), Lorenzo Sirigatti (La practica di Prospettiva), Manfredo Tafuri, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Scherzi di Fantasia, Vari Capricci), Paolo Toscanelli, Bernard Tschumi (Architecture and Disjunction), Anna Teresa Tymieniecka, Piero Valeriano (Hieroglyphica), Giorgio Vasari (Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects), Vienna, Virgil (Aenead), Vitruvius, Horace Walpole (Anecdotes of Painting in England, The Castle of Otranto), Wilhelm Worringer (Abstraction and Empathy), Edward Young (Night Thoughts), Federico Zuccari (Origine e Progresso dell’Academia del Disegno

¿Abstracción o empatía? Wilhelm Worringer y la cultura expresionista

Peer Reviewe

Wilhelm Worringer, el mensajero del arte de Fin de Siglo y los inicios de la abstracción.

Sin resume

The dialectics of vision: Oskar Kokoschka and the historiography of expressionistic sight

In his seminal essay ‘On the Nature of Visions’, Oskar Kokoschka proposes a theory of expressionistic sight that advocates the centrality of both optical and psychological processes in the development of this sensorial construct. The present study argues that Kokoschka’s novel handling of the role of vision in the image forming process implicitly elucidates expressionistic sight as a process fashioned through the dialectical tension that arises from these two prevalent, though oppositional views of artistic vision in the early twentieth century. As such, the historiography of expressionistic sight offered by Kokoschka stands in stark contrast to other prevailing histories written by his interlocutors in fin-de-siècle Germany and Austria