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Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular
image
A culture in crisis? (Dimitri Goossens)
Transgressive art and images attack our way of perception and interpretation…
• Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou, 1929
Zbigniew Libera, Lego Concentration Camp, 1996
Robert Gligorov, The Jacketwaiting, 1997
Andres Serrano, The Morgue: Hacked to death II, 1992
GENERAL REMARKS
• Central idea in work: – Uprooting of mankind
– Alienation of mankind
• Causes: – Secularization
– Disenchantment
• Consequence: – Loneliness of western man
1) Roger Scruton: analysis of a culture in crisis
Postmodernism
1) Roger Scruton: analysis of a culture in crisis
• Roger Scruton, Beauty, 2009
THE CRISIS
• Crisis of beauty : symptom of western culture in crisis
• Criticism: chapter ‘Flight from Beauty’
– Crisis of ‘the sacred’: fundament of crisis of beauty
– Central point: postmodern desecration
• Destruction and defilement of claims of aesthetic judgment to transcendent ideals (‘Defilement of Beauty’)
• Addiction to shock, ‘savage fantasies’
1) Roger Scruton: analysis of a culture in crisis
HIS SOLUTION
• Restauration of beauty
– -Elevation to transcendent ideals (sacred)
– Redemption: ‘fallen’ condition
• Through this restauration:
– ‘Humanitas’ (Bildung)
– Art as replacement for religion
1) Roger Scruton: analysis of a culture in crisis
Romantic ideals
• ‘Sak’ : root of….
– Sanctus
– Sacred
• Roger Scruton versus Georges Bataille:
– ‘the sacred’: conceptual difference
– Defilement and transgression
2) Postmodern desecration: crisis of the sacred?
• Georges Bataille:
– Art as ‘tear’ or ‘cut’ to the sacred (déchirure)
– Artwork:
• set apart
• ex-static, transgressive (norm, taboo) Cfr. Heideggers description of Greek temple
• Julia Kristeva:
– The abject: ‘fallen’ state, cast out (taboo)
2) Postmodern desecration: crisis of the sacred?
3) Contemporary transgressive art and image
Vanitas
3) Contemporary transgressive art and image
J.M.W. Turner, Vesuvius in Eruption, 1817 Damien Hirst, Physical impossibility of death in the mind of
someone living, 1991
The sublime
3) Contemporary transgressive art and image
Damien Hirst, A Thousand Years, 1990
HORROR (popular transgressive image)
• Themes in horror
– The sublime monster
– Human frailty: the body
– Conservative moral
– Human?/Inhuman?
– Questioning of beliefs
3) Contemporary transgressive art and image
• Question what it means to be human still central
• Making a ‘tear’ or ‘cut’ in everyday beliefs and categories
• Confirming beliefs and ideals by transgression
• Reminder of moral frailty and of reality of evil
• Sense of community: shared fears
• Sense of moral and aesthetic stability through shock
4) Conclusion: …a dark mirror
Caravaggio, Medusa, 1598-1599
Blog: www.aldussprak.typepad.com