Head

Prof. Dr. Peter Geimer

Research Associates

Dr. des Leena Crasemann / Maria Remesat, M.A.

Objective

This research project proceeds from the assumption that the materiality and thingness of artworks also belong firmly to the bases and conditions of aesthetic experience. This thingness cannot be dissociated from the ways in which the artwork appears. Artworks furthermore share their status as thing with everyday objects and therefore always exist in relationship with the sphere in which objects are used and handled in a non-artistic manner. It is only through artistic intervention, acts of interpretation and judgement, attributions and the framework of institutions that the things used can become a work that can be experienced aesthetically. This process of transformation from thing to artwork is neither irreversible nor independent of historical, cultural and institutional contexts. The relationship of artwork and thing can thus be recognized as a history of varying demarcations and dissolutions of limits.

Our work is based on two fundamental premises: 1) That aesthetic experience constitutes itself at the boundary lines, thresholds and transitions between artistic and extra-artistic phenomena, i.e. at the point where the aesthetic status of the artwork is not yet secured but is still in question and must first of all crystallize as distinct from the latter’s character purely as thing.  2. That the thing’s potential to become art at the same time corresponds to a potential inherent in art to become thing, namely as soon as the thingness of the work rises to the fore and even succeeds in dominating perception. 

Against this backdrop, our research project investigates the dissolution of limits between art/work and thing, between aesthetic experience and practical use, between artistically communicated illusion and the appearance of ‘the thing itself’ in its different historical guises from the 19th century to the present day.

Subproject 1: Painting, photography, thing. Realistic effects in 19th-century panoramas

(Prof. Dr. Peter Geimer)

The incorporation of real objects into the sphere of the artwork assumed a number of forms in 20th-century art (collage, readymade, objet trouvé, combine painting etc.). The accompanying dissolution of the artwork’s limits through its inclusion of utility objects and consumer goods seems to be an achievement of the avant-garde, one only made possible by the radical questioning of the traditional panel painting and an ‘exit from the picture’. But a particular form of this dissolution of the limits of artwork and thing had in fact already been developed in 19th-century painting, namely in the faux terrain of panoramas, in other words the zone between the painted canvas and the viewing platform in which real objects (weapons, furnishings, rocks, vegetation etc.) were deposited, so that the illusionistic painting of the panorama flowed directly into the real presence of things. As an integral component of an art aimed at simulating reality as closely as possible, the faux terrain is radically different from the above-mentioned syntheses of art and thing by the 20th-century avant-garde, which on the contrary wanted to break with the illusionistic effects of painting. At the same time, however, it also differs from the artistic tradition of trompe l’œil, since the faux terrain does not contain objects painted to look real, but the ‘artless’ object itself. What may appear as simply an extension of an illusionistic art instead allows us to recognize an aesthetic practice that undermines a condition of all pictorial theories – namely the fundamental premise that a picture is always a picture of something else, the representation of a thing which is not the same as the picture itself. In the objects situated in the faux terrain, this difference between the picture as an object having its own materiality and what is rendered visible in the picture is suspended.

Fundamental questions are thereby raised regarding the aesthetic and art-theoretical status of this confrontation of painting and ‘the thing itself’: against the backdrop of contemporary art theory and aesthetics, to what extent, if indeed any, can the objects of the faux terrain become an integral component of the work? As ‘found’, i.e. not strictly speaking ‘made’ objects, where do they stand vis-à-vis traditional categories such as authorship, originality and style? What are the means and processes that should here be used to create a new space of experience? The aim of this subproject is to analyse the panorama as a new and specific space of aesthetic experience, a space founded to a significant extent upon a complex interplay of ‘realistic effects’.

Subproject 2: Interfaces. Sewn objects in the fine arts since 1960

(Dr. des. Leena Crasemann)

The question as to the relationship of material nature, limit and thingness takes on a particular significance in the case of the sewn seam as a constitutive component of art objects.  The seam is thereby to be understood not just as a line drawn with a needle and thread. Above and beyond its material-related character, it evokes several, very different levels of significance, as for example when it serves as a demarcation, when it symbolizes a wound or scar, or when as a connecting line it fuses two things into one.

The artworks to be investigated range from textile installations to photographic montages and sculptural objects, and stem from artists including Louise Bourgeois, Andy Warhol and Pip Culbert. They employ the seam as seam, as pattern or as scar and keep in the foreground at all times the performance of the manual activity and the material thingness of the worked object. The genuine act of sewing as a centuries-old handicraft technique produces the sewed object, which is in turn elevated above its contextualization to artwork.

The aim of this subproject is to investigate, on the basis of selected works, the relationship of artistic and material parameters in the example of the seam as a figure of boundary-drawing. I shall ask to what extent the seam refers to the production process and moment of manufacture and how it gives shape to the material nature of the sewn object. At the same time I shall ask how the seam defines the aesthetic potential of the artwork in question and how it establishes its specific work character.

Subproject 3: The incandescent light bulb. The appearance and disappearance of an object in art

(Maria Remesat, M.A.)

In the concrete example of the incandescent light bulb, which made its way into the fine arts with the avant-garde, this project investigates processes of transformation and reciprocal relationships between everyday utility item and object in art and design. It asks the fundamental question as to what aesthetic, formal and functional qualities predestined the incandescent light bulb, as an industrial product developed in the 19th century, to become an object of design, and above all an integral component of artworks – whereby this status is currently once again in the process of change. A thing such as the incandescent light bulb as a component of art and design at the same time belongs to the extra-artistic everyday world and is consequently also subject to the latter’s historical changes, which generate its aesthetic perceptibility and its status as work or thing.

The project analyses art and design objects of the 20th and 21st century, such as Joseph Beuys’ Capri Battery, Spencer Finch’s Moon Dust (Apollo 17) and Ingo Maurer’s Bulb. The project is made particularly pertinent by the fact that conventional light bulbs are currently in a transition stadium in the wake of the EC’s Eco-Design directive. As well as examining the historical appearance and establishment of the incandescent light bulb in art, the project therefore also enquires into the consequences and conditions of its future disappearance from daily life and its simultaneous paradoxical survival in art and as art.