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Discourse

There is clearly a friendship between art and philosophy. Like with any friendship, the articulation of a certain difference between the two parties is an important part. Art and philosophy are not one and the same thing. However, the difference already fades in the conceptualisation of art and of philosophy. Perhaps what connects art and philosophy is that art generates a singular concept of art, and philosophy its own concept of philosophy. This publication accompanies the exhibition of the same name curated by Marcus Steinweg at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein.

The publication Freedom of Speech accompanies the same-named exhibition at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and at Kunstverein Hamburg. It analyzes the concept of freedom of speech and its ideological role, which they play in Western democracies today. Everything revolves around the central question: What, if only he or she may speak, who tells the truth? The publication draws on the principle of the exhibitions and interrelates examples of media coverage (including the “Muhammad cartoons” or the controversial covers of the Hustler magazine and the front pages of Stern and Spiegel), historical events (such as the Black Power Movement and the Free Speech Movement in the U.S.) as well as artistic positions (including Hans Haacke, Sister Corita Kent, George Maciunas, Silke Wagner, Mark Wallinger). Together with the Duisburg Institute of Language and Social Research (DISS), artworks and contemporary historical material are examined for their verisimilitude by means of the theories of Michel Foucault and the critical discourse analysis.

Art education today, is an institutional imperative. Without it—in terms of offering communication—no institution, no publicly funded project can get along. The increase in aesthetic and cultural education meanwhile promises not only the reconciliation of the senses and reason, and a holistically educated humanist personality, but educational politicians equally dream of future museum visitors and creative subjects of work. If art education wants a way out of the educational imperative and of the art jewelry box, it wants to connect to art with a political claim, which is self-evident in terms of education theory. How one such critical art education is conceivable, is described in this anthology from different theoretical perspectives and discussed by artists and art educators.

Images do not show reality: they make it. The book Jenseits der Repräsentation / Beyond Representation is a collection of essays by filmmaker and author Hito Steyerl. In chapters such as “Traveling Images”, “Return of the Real” or “Cultural Factories”, phenomena of the digital presence, of contemporary art, as well as of everyday culture are analyzed and cross-read with political and aesthetic processes of transformation. Jenseits der Repräsentation / Beyond Representation deals with images and sounds, that, in a changing world, create new relationships with objects, become objects themselves, or produce other objects and images. Curator and writer Simon Sheikh and film scholar Thomas Elsässer respond in their contributions from different perspectives.

This essay explores the relationship between performance art and the performativity of every day life, the daily compulsion to act. Starting with contemporary artists like Tamy Ben-Tor, Carey Young, Jan Mančuška, Jan Northoff, and Claus Carstensen/Peter Bonde, performative schisms between artistic performance and everyday performance in relationships, art work, on the street, and in virtual everyday life are explored. How inspiring is performance art for everyday performance?

With an analytically provocative eye, Oliver Marchart examines the last three documenta exhibitions. Based on the theories of Gramsci and Laclau/Mouffe , museums and biennials are portrayed as national and global hegemony machines that at once reproduce bourgeois mainstream culture and make it subject to critique. Along with the young history of documenta, the canonic schift in the fields of politics, postcolonial thory, and education (D11) is traced as well as the battle over normative power (dX), and the attempt at reversal (d12).

The current relation between art and society is characterized by a basic contradiction: capitalist society, becoming ever more brutal in the course of globalization, adorns itself with critical works of art and appropriates artistic creativity as a continuous engine of capitalist development. Using selected counterexamples of art and cultural politics, Marius Babias explores how far art, through the mobilization of critical content, can contribute to strengthening the notion of publicity as a forum for negotiating social conflicts and political participation.

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