ANIMATION

Gülsüm Baydar | Thiery de Duve | Deniz Göktürk | Joseph Margolis | Gunnar Olsson
Maryvonne Saison | Richard Schusterman | İsmail Tunalı (Special Talk)

Gülsüm Baydar
The Walls in/of Architecture

The wall is both a powerful metaphor and the most basic architectural element. At both levels, it can be seen as the marker of separation or the provider of a threshold. The wall may draw boundaries, break or establish relationships. Physically, the wall may enclose buildings, neighbourhoods or cities. As such, it is an unmistakable component of architectural space. Also, providing an external surface, i. e. a face, to the building, it is one of the major determinants of architectural form, i. e. style.

Form and space are the optic and haptic components of architecture respectively. The dominant fi ction of the discipline privileges the former. With few exceptions, architectural form is named with reference to culture (Ancient Greek architecture; Renaissance architecture; Chinese, Indian Turkish architecture etc.) On the basis of form, architecture becomes a marker of cultural separation. It builds walls between cultures both literally and metaphorically. Furthermore, especially since the colonial encounters these walls have been consistently constructed on hierarchical grounds. Form and locality are decidedly and irreversably connected in architectural discourse and practice.

Assuming that the architectural discipline cannot do away with the materiality of the wall, the question is can the latter be thought differently? I will argue that recent developments in building practices and architectural representation techniques may point to an affi rmative answer which renders the wall fl exible and permeable and which complicates the conveniently simplifi ed relationship between form, space and locality.

Thiery De Duve
Art in the Face of Radical Evil

The legitimacy of aesthetic experience is sometimes put to the hard test of extreme political and humanitarian circumstances. I shall consider an exhibition which I saw in 1997 at the “Rencontres photographiques d’Arles,” entitled S-21 and consisting of 100 photos of people who had been killed in the extermination camp of Tuol Sleng, during the genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, 1975-1979. The photos are incredibly moving and disturbing. The American photographers who found, restored and enlarged the negatives even fi nd them “beautiful”. The Museum of Modern Art in New York bought eight of these photos and mounted an exhibition of some twenty of them at the same time as the Arles exhibition. The question is thereby raised as to whether “genocidal images” can be considered as “art”— a question to which there is no easy and comfortable answer.

Deniz Göktürk
Sound Bridges: Transnational Mobility as Ironic Melodrama

Focusing on the orchestral interludes in Head-On (2003), this paper investigates how the representation of transnational mobility, space, and cross-border traffi c is underscored by ironic strategies of interruption and distancing, which are discussed in relation to traditions of melodrama. The performances of the orchestra in the fi lm are illuminated further by the director Fatih Akın’s subsequent musical documentary about Istanbul, Crossing the Bridge (2005). My analysis of how the clarinetist Selim Sesler and other Roma performers are employed in both fi lms opens up questions about the signifi cance of gypsy music and complicates designations of ethnicity and authenticity in transnational cinema. On a broader scale, the paper addresses the following questions: How does cinema participate in the construction of locality within globalization, and what is the role of music in this context? Can multilocal, multilingual productions destabilize the polarization of diasporic vs. indigenous identities through acting and staging? How useful are concepts such as migrant or diasporic cinema (in relation to world cinema and national cinemas)?

Joseph Margolis
State of the Arts

Our approach to aesthetics has become global. But what that means needs to be spelled out with care. I begin my refl ection on the issue by reviewing the signifi cance of aesthetics having been launched as an academic discipline with the publication of Kant’s third Critique, which set its initial orientation in terms of the antinomy of taste and Kant’s transcendental solution of the puzzle. The Critique has dominated professional discussion in an extraordinary way even to our own day. I don’t think this infl uence has been entirely benefi cial – and I offer reasons for thinking that it has made for a poor beginning. It needed a correction of a deep sort along the lines of favoring the objective analysis of works of art, the historical expression of diverse cultures, and the displacement of Kant’s emphasis on the demands of transcendentalism as opposed to the advantages of a transcendental inquiry in which our a priori posits prove to be a posteriori in nature. All this has been drawn from the corrective work of the post-Kantian Idealists and Hegel in particular. In this way, the nature of aesthetic investigation has been continually revised with the perceived needs of every age. In our own time, the mixed history of aesthetics must overcome the threat of what amounts to cultural imperialism and the near-invisible forms of academic colonialism. I try to show how this works and how its hegemony has been facilitated by its Kantian beginnings. The problem may be focused in terms of the abstract distinction between the global and the universal, but ultimately it cannot be resolved except by a kind of cultural generosity empirically focused and attentive to its political objective.

Maryvonne Saison
Le peuple manque

C’est à travers l’idéal d’un sensus communis que l’esthétique a offert à la philosophie une articulation au politique. A l’aide du concept de « régime esthétique » par lequel le philosophe Jacques Rancière défi nit le déplacement fondamental opéré au XVIIIème siècle par l’esthétique pour penser ensemble l’art et la sensibilité, je m’interroge sur l’idée de « sociabilité esthétique ».

Au coeur de mon propos, une question : comment comprendre aujourd’hui l’affi rmation deleuzienne selon laquelle l’art doit « contribuer à l’invention d’un peuple »?

Consensus et dissensus : deux écueils entre lesquels art et philosophie naviguent à vue, deux polarités entre lesquelles il faut sans doute s’abstenir de choisir.

Richard Schusterman
Art and Religion

Art, like philosophy, emerged in ancient times from myth, magic, and religion, and it has long sustained its compelling power through its spiritual aura. Like cultic objects of worship, successful artworks exert an entrancing, transfi guring spell over us, captivating our attention and engaging our bodily senses, minds, and souls. Their special meaning and value makes them stand out from the ordinary things of everyday reality, while also evoking, through the imaginative visions and experiential power they provide, a heightened sense of the real and the suggestion of deeper, more spiritual realities than those expressed by cold common sense and science. Since the nineteenth century’s interest in “art for arts sake”, thinkers as different as Matthew Arnold and Stephan Mallarme have argued that art would supplant traditional religion as the spiritual locus of the increasingly secular society of Western modernity.

In twentieth-century intellectual culture, these prophecies have largely been realized. One might speak here of a religion of art. Its masterpieces have the aura of sacred texts; it has both a priestly class of creative artists providing new transfi gurative visions and a priestly class of interpreters. These not only explain art’s deep and hidden meanings to the community of the faithful (who visit the museums faithfully on the weekends instead of the traditional centers of religious congregation) but they also defend the controversial value of new and diffi cult works against the criticism of skeptics outside the faith.

If art can capture the sort of spirituality, idealism, and expressive community of traditional religions but without being ensnared in the particular doctrines, rituals, and historical confl icts that make these religions such a persistent source of intellectual disbelief and transcultural discord, can art then provide a sturdy bridge between cultures that historical religions have violently divided? Can art achieve the spiritual unifi cation of humanity that world religions purport to seek but always fail to achieve? The virtues and problems of this proposal should be explored.

İsmail Tunalı
Art and Religion

This study addresses the new epistemological meaning of the world and its refl ection on art by looking at developments in arts and sciences in 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

In the second half of the 19th century natural sciences gained a new acceleration. When one examines the epistemological mode of the 19th century, one sees that positivist sciences developed and a positivist art emerged. Natural sciences enter to the 20th century as mathematic positive natural sciences with a new understanding of reality. Such a reality approach also affects art, and art concepts change totally in this century. On the other hand, the new century brings a new epistemological world picture and a new epistemological meaning of the world. Accordingly, the term information age expresses a new epistemological reality. Thus, art of the information age will develop outside traditional naturalism and abstract art dialectics which exist since the Renaissance. In this sense, art would be a new art which is anti-conventional and anti-humanistic. Art will gradually lose its traditional local and national identity within an integration of a universal mind, a global world and a universal taste.

In the study after the examination of the development of positivism and art in the 19th century; new understanding of reality and changes in the art concept in the 20th century will be analyzed in terms of epistemology. Then, the new epistemological reality of the information age and changes of art in this new period will be analyzed.

SANART Association of Aesthethics and Visual Culture © 2005