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Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image A culture in crisis? (Dimitri Goossens)

Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image Goossens_Ugliness... · Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image A culture in crisis? (Dimitri Goossens)

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Page 1: Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image Goossens_Ugliness... · Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image A culture in crisis? (Dimitri Goossens)

Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular

image

A culture in crisis? (Dimitri Goossens)

Page 2: Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image Goossens_Ugliness... · 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

Page 3: Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image Goossens_Ugliness... · Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image A culture in crisis? (Dimitri Goossens)

Zbigniew Libera, Lego Concentration Camp, 1996

Page 4: Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image Goossens_Ugliness... · Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image A culture in crisis? (Dimitri Goossens)

Robert Gligorov, The Jacketwaiting, 1997

Page 5: Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image Goossens_Ugliness... · Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image A culture in crisis? (Dimitri Goossens)

Andres Serrano, The Morgue: Hacked to death II, 1992

Page 6: Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image Goossens_Ugliness... · Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image A culture in crisis? (Dimitri Goossens)

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

Page 7: Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image Goossens_Ugliness... · Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image A culture in crisis? (Dimitri Goossens)

1) Roger Scruton: analysis of a culture in crisis

• Roger Scruton, Beauty, 2009

Page 8: Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image Goossens_Ugliness... · Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image A culture in crisis? (Dimitri Goossens)

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

Page 9: Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image Goossens_Ugliness... · Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image A culture in crisis? (Dimitri Goossens)

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

Page 10: Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image Goossens_Ugliness... · Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image A culture in crisis? (Dimitri Goossens)

• ‘Sak’ : root of….

– Sanctus

– Sacred

• Roger Scruton versus Georges Bataille:

– ‘the sacred’: conceptual difference

– Defilement and transgression

2) Postmodern desecration: crisis of the sacred?

Page 11: Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image Goossens_Ugliness... · Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image A culture in crisis? (Dimitri Goossens)

• 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?

Page 12: Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image Goossens_Ugliness... · Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image A culture in crisis? (Dimitri Goossens)

3) Contemporary transgressive art and image

Vanitas

Page 13: Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image Goossens_Ugliness... · Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image A culture in crisis? (Dimitri Goossens)

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

Page 14: Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image Goossens_Ugliness... · Ugliness and savagery in contemporary art and popular image A culture in crisis? (Dimitri Goossens)

3) Contemporary transgressive art and image

Damien Hirst, A Thousand Years, 1990

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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

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• 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

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Caravaggio, Medusa, 1598-1599

Blog: www.aldussprak.typepad.com