Sven Lütticken
DIALECTIC OF DIONYSUS
The seemingly self-explanatory category of ‘artists’ writings’ covers a wide variety of practices and has undergone substantial historical transformations. Early twentieth-century modern artists often produced treatises that attempted to legitimize unprecedented forms through plodding attempts at dialectical exposition (Mondrian) or exhortatory symbolist-futurist prose (Malevich). In a step that was to have profound consequences, Duchamp used his notes not for explanation but for exploration, making them into an integral part of his practices. In the 1960s and 1970s, conceptual artists such as Dan Graham and Robert Smithson developed the essay as an artistic form in its own right, using the magazine as a medium. Contemporary artists such as Paul Chan and Hito Steyerl, though they have abandoned the conceptualist impulse to designate texts or ‘magazine pieces’ as artworks, continue to write essays as part of their artistic practice.
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Cultural Revolution
Mutations of an untimely concept, in a period when capitalism has arrogated to itself the power of radical transformation. From Debord and Marcuse to the contemporary art world, by way of punk rock and hip hop.
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Performance Art After TV
Relations between TV and performance art since the 1960s as a tangled skein of complicity and contestation. Sven Lütticken traces shifts in modes of acting, working and self-presentation, within a televisual world itself now being absorbed by cybernetic and digital systems.
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Playtimes
Once deemed extinct, the play instinct now pervades the worlds of work and leisure. Can it be turned to radical ends? Sven Lütticken seeks clues in Schiller and Debord, Neuschwanstein and computer games.
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Attending to Abstract Things
From the philosophe De Brosses in the eighteenth century to the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman and the conceptualist Sol LeWitt in the twentieth—via Hegel, Creuzer and Marx—the fates of the fetish and the commodity, in critical thought and art.
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Unnatural History
Do increasingly dark ecological portents indicate a deeper transformation of nature itself? Sven Lütticken elaborates a historicized conception of nature, seeking precedents and contrasts in 19th- and 20th-century philosophies and fictions. Dinosaurs and overmen, Geist and entropic decline in Verne, Nietzsche, Schelling and Smithson.
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Idolatry and its Discontents
Amid rhetorical dust-storms over purported Islamist threats to Western values, Sven Lütticken finds antecedents for contemporary struggles over the image in Judaic and Protestant bans on idolatry. Multiple meanings of the veil and varying forms of iconoclasm, under the aegis of the spectacle.
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Suspense and . . . Surprise
Media projections of the ‘war on terror’ as manipulations of shock and time, purveyed through a perpetual present of 24-hour coverage and on-line news. Lessons from Hitchcock, Conrad and Benjamin on the poetics of suspense and possibilities for a rehistoricization of the attentat.
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The Feathers of the Eagle
Lifting, swiping, zapping: popular expressions that have been aesthetic tactics since Dada. Sven Lütticken recasts the history of such practices of appropriation—not excluding those of Warhol or Debord, sometimes misplaced—as so many exercises in mythology. Anticipated by Flaubert, theorized by Barthes, staged by Broodthaers, is time running out for such creative misuses of past or present, as ‘intellectual property rights’ tighten?
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After the Gods
Mythology as the ‘condition and subject of all art’ in the varying conceptions of the early German Romantics and neoclassicism: from Schelling and Schlegel to Winckelmann and Goethe, meditations on Laocoon and anticipations of the Gesamtkunstwerk—issuing into the uncanny mythopoeias of modernity in Melville’s Confidence Man and the White Whale.
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Planet of the Remakes
From Hollywood retreads to avatars of Dr Mabuse and re-creations of Solaris, the mimetic planet. Dialectic of repetition and historicity in the remake, reviled mainstay of the culture industry—and manifesto for a radical reappropriation of the form.
