Anti-mémoires. Noms, reflets et écritures

Arthur Danto asserts that Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington really embodies the beauty of his meaning. For him, the Memorial’s “internal beauty” is felt and read because she is built as a text by the rhetoric of enthymeme, as a syllogism based on some tacit knowledges and highly probables communplaces. However, the relationship to the Kant’s pulchritudo adhaerens and philosophy of architecture is not an easy one : Danto rejects as unreadable the self-referent formalism of Greenberg’s Modernism and the environmental non-monumentality of Richard Serra’s Minimalism, but the agency of the Memorial’s shared internal beauty is haunted by an unquestioned spectral logic. Actually, the image embodiment in this work can always exceed the rhetoric of reconnaissance supported by the syllogistic rhetoric and disturb the identity framework of the nord-american community. The beholders’ reflecting shape on the Memorial can become, finally, an unreadable and pathetic index, or be perceived as a figural imprint, ephemeral and troubling ; these disembodied pictures can achieve a medial incarnation – e.g. a Verkörperung – of the underworld

El vientre de los modernos. Psicología, fisiologia y filologia de la consciencia historíca

“La ‘modernidad’ a través de la imagen de la comida y la digestión”. Ésta es la tarea y el programa de la genealogía fisiológica y psicológica identificada con claridad por Nietzsche en un fragmento del otoño de 1888 y firmemente perseguida en toda su obra. El diagnóstico es implacable y es posible por un uso extendido de la metáfora gastronómica, aplicada a todos los campos de la experiencia y el lenguaje por una escritura temeraria de la historia. Como Valéry y Péguy también lo ilustran, la experiencia de los hombres contemporáneos es pobre y enferma y se caracteriza por una duplicidad radical y una contradicción sin síntesis. No sólo las cosas, como además lo muestra en sus análisis sobre las mercancías como nuevos jeroglíficos que marcan el espacio saturado de la metrópolis, sino también el hombre es doble, así como su corporizada y profundamente fisiológica economía. Su estómago hambriento tiene dos caras, porque todo lo toma pero no nutre en absoluto; vocifera acerca de entusiasmos varios y heterogéneos, no sobre un verdadero alimento para ser absorbido y transformado. En resumen, vive por un instante sin pasado ni futuro. El opuesto de esta lógica de la enfermedad y la insensibilidad en busca de muchas sensaciones y shocks sensacionales, y el reverso de este olvido por rapidez excesiva, es un ser anti- o incluso premoderno en extremo. En los tiempos modernos, el entrenamiento de un criticismo genuino acerca de los prejuicios y el supuesto auto-conocimiento implican una regresión y una alteración de las propias identidades históricas, las creencias y los valores. Finalmente, como Benjamin y Warburg lo revelaron, el criticismo es como tornarse otra vez animal y la interpretación es como recuperar la lentitud y la melancolía de un eterno masticar, al igual que un perro o una vaca

Azul pintado de azul. Leyendas de artistas sin obras

En el verano de 1947, Yves Klein, Claude Pascal, Armand Fernández, sentados en la playa de Niza: contemplan el mar y el cielo azul, no hacen nada, y hacen declaraciones sobre el arte que llegará, sobre el Arte y el Gran Estilo del Futuro. A partir de ese momento, y de esas palabras, cada una de sus vidas cambia radicalmente: se convertirá en una vida nueva, una vida de artista sin obras, hecha solo de palabras, narraciones, gestos. En ese episodio, nace el Nouveau Realisme y la voluntad artística de la superación del problema del arte según el Modernismo y la Action Painting. En ese episodio y en su narración, hecha sucesivamente por los tres jóvenes artistas, se puede localizar el nacimiento del propio y auténtico mito del artista contemporáneo

Poetica Mundi. Estetica e ontologia dele forme in Paul Claudel

«A book full of books»: that is how Paul Claudel (1868-1955), one of the most important French poets and playwrights of the 20th century, defines his Art Poétique, his only explicitly theoretical and philosophic work. Written in China between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, Art Poétique bears the evidence of the decline of positivism and symbolism and is influenced by the new neo-Thomist spiritualism. Art Poétique provided the basis for the entire poetics of Claudel, who returned and reelaborated its theme and images in original ways in his plays and poems, as well as in such exegetic prose essays as Introduction à la peinture hollandaise, which inspired philosophers like Bachelard and Wahl and informed Merleau-Ponty's and Maldiney's reflections on the visual arts. Influenced by metaphorology, the present study analyzes the connections and contrasts between the various lexicons and notions that, though different and at time almost incompatible, are brought together in Claudel's writing, which draws from Thomas Aquinas and Mallarmé, Poe and Augustine. The debate regarding the imitation of the poiesis of nature and the autonomy of art, the tension between the stable identity of form and the fluctuating forces that at once constitute and transgress it, the relationship between formation and apocalypse, between morphologic and eschatological variation, the problem of the legibility or figuration of the aesthetic world, the dichotomy between knowing and seeing: these are the issues that reveal how Claudel's theologic aesthetic is not an ideological philosophy of art or a specialistic reflection on poetic and rhetorical institutions. Rather, his aesthetic is an ambitious cosmogony of the 20th century and a complex ontology of living forms that, to this very day, deserves to be examined in light of the anxieties it expresses and the issues it raises, even more than for the solutions it proposes

L'art désœuvré, modes d'emploi. Entre esthétique et théorie de la restauration

In the ontology of the work of art and its regimes of existence, Gérard Genette  gives but little room to the theory and practice of restoration. However, restoration is seen in relation to the identity of the work itself and to its material and  pragmatic temporality and anachronism. In the wake of Nelson Goodman, it is also understood as a form of actuation of the aesthetic experience. Starting from these premises, the present essay intends to examine the relationship between Genette’s and Daniel Arasse’s reflections on restoration and the history of art, highlighting their similarities and differences with Cesare Brandi’s theory of restoration and, therefore, pointing out their as yet undischarged debts to Sartre’s phenomenology of image.  </p

Dal mondo dell'arte al regno delle ombre (e ritorno). Arthur Danto, Maya Lin e la bellezza interna

Filippo FIMIANI, (2010) Dal mondo dell’arte al regno delle ombre (e ritorno). Arthur Danto, Maya Lin e la bellezza interna, «Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico», 2/2010, pp. 253-280. ISSN: 2035-8466. ITALIANO. Arthur Danto sostiene che il Vietnam Veterans Memorial di Maya Lin a Washington incarna il paradigma retorico del significato della bellezza interna. Tuttavia, il riferimento alla pulchritudo adhaerens di Kant è problematico: le critiche al formalismo auto-riflessivo del Modernismo di Greenberg e i richiami impliciti al Minimalismo di Richard Serra – e all’antimonumentalità p.es. di Jochen Gerz – sono, infatti, affetti da un’inindagata logica spettrale dell’incarnazione dell’immagine. Il riflesso degli spettatori sul monumento funerario è, finalmente, indice patetico e Verkörperung mediale dell’assenza.Arthur Danto asserts that Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington embodies the rhetoric paradigm of internal beauty’s meaning. However, the relationship to the Kant’s pulchritudo adhaerens is not an easy one: Danto’s recalls against the self-referent formalism of Greenberg’s Modernism and his tacit issues about the environmental non-monumentality of Richard Serra’s Minimalism, are, most importantly, haunted by the unquestioned spectral logic of the image embodiment. The beholders’ reflecting shape on the funeral Wall is, finally, both a pathetic index and a medial incarnation–e.g. a Verkörperung–of the underworld

Miroirs incarnés. Des images aux affects, et retour.

XVèmes Entretiens de la Garenne Lemot. http://www.pur-editions.fr/detail.php?idOuv=270

Dal mondo dell’arte al regno delle ombre (e ritorno). Arthur Danto, Maya Lin e la bellezza interna

Arthur Danto asserts that Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington embodies the rhetoric paradigm of internal beauty’s meaning. However, the relationship to the Kant’s pulchritudo adhaerens is not an easy one: Danto’s recalls against the self-referent formalism of Greenberg’s Modernism and his tacit issues about the environmental non-monumentality of Richard Serra’s Minimalism, are, most importantly, haunted by the unquestioned spectral logic of the image embodiment. The beholders’ reflecting shape on the funeral Wall is, finally, both a pathetic index and a medial incarnation (Verkörperung) of the underworld

Faceless Gazes. Rhetoric and Politics of the Google Street View

Potentialities of attention and distraction with respect to images are critically reprised by Neapolitan artist Domenico Antonio Mancini. In Landscapes (2019), Google Street View addresses painted on canvases take the place of outlying areas of Italian cities, and of canonical oil ‘vedute’ paintings, obliging the viewer to switch from aesthetic absorption to a multitasking, reflexive attention enabled by the tools of mobile devices and the operative agency between the displayed and depicted images. Attracted by the ephemeral, geo-localized vistas displayed on their smartphones, spectator-users must deal with the dynamis of the on-line GSV images: rhetorical and predictable, though, at the same time, and perhaps unintentionally, serendipitous and figural