Conference
The re-turn of beauty II
Conference
The conference is the finale of our project About Beauty. It takes up the themes that have been addressed in performances, films, discussions and the exhibition and presents them for discussion.
PROGRAMME
10:00-13:15h
Wendy Steiner: The model and the re-turn of beauty
"The model is the embodied subject of art. Modernists ignored or denied her; feminists presented her as either a victim or a burden. After this history, the problem for contemporary artists is how to represent the female subject without disempowering her or evoking a nostalgia for pre-modernist art. This dilemma has made the model one of the central concerns of recent literature and visual art."
Lecture by Wendy Steiner, Professor of Englisch, University of Pennsylvania
Marie Luise Angerer: Beauty Cuts
"When the French artist Orlan placed herself under the surgeon's knife in the early 1990s, art audiences reacted very ambivalently. We were not only irritated by the fact that she presented these operations as a form of art praxis, but also by the fact that we - as spectators - were exposed to this technique of incision. Nowadays we can consume operations of this nature every day in the form of real TV, television series and other programmes. The body is not obsolete (as the past decade of cyber hype has persistently asserted); but the socio-cultural matrix of gender identities has succumbed to a practice of surgical incisions."
Lecture by Marie Luise Angerer, Professor for Gender and the Media, Kunsthochschule für Medien, Cologne
Lev Manovich: Info-Aesthetics
"In the beginning of the twentieth century, artists, architects and designers declared that machine and machine-produced forms were beautiful. These ideas to a large extend has shaped the aesthetics of twentieth century culture. Today we should ask news question: what is the new beauty specific to a global informational society? If we have moved from modernism to 'informationalism', what kinds of new aesthetics, cultural forms, and sensibilities are entailed by this transition? My info-aesthetics project/book (2000) looks for info-aesthetics 'genes' which are already present in a variety of different cultural fields: architecture, web, graphic and product design, fashion, media computing, data visualization, cinema, art, etc."
Lecture by Lev Manovich, Media artist and Professor for Media art and theory, University of California, San Diego
14:30-18:00h
David Eng: The Beauty of Family
"My current research on family and kinship in the late-twentieth century focuses, in particular, on transnational adoption of Asian infants by white European and North American parents. In this presentation, I will explore how the mimetic relationship between parents and child is disrupted precisely at the site of the aesthetic, in the necessary valuation and revaluation of the beauty of an unrecognizable child. In what ways does transnational adoption serve to reconsolidate the paternal mandate in a global age of multicultural management? In what ways does it present us with an ethical possibility for a form of social organization indexed to Leonardo's unorthodox practice of beauty?"
Lecture by David Eng, Professor for English and Comparative Literature, Rutgers University, New York.
Supported by the United States of America Embassy Berlin
Els van der Plas: Beauty as a basic need
"What is beautiful? Where, when and why, and how can we judge art in different cultural contexts? In relation to this, I will also discuss the role that art and beauty play in complex societies, for instance in war zones and post-traumatic societies. Is it important to save beauty in ugly situations? Can art and beauty’s ability to convey hope and comfort, respect and solidarity be as important as the provision of food and shelter in times of disaster?"
Els van der Plas is art historian, critic and curator. She is director of the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, Den Haag.
Panel discussion: The Globalization of Beauty
with Els van der Plas, Olu Oguibe, Gayatri Spivak
Moderation: Ackbar Abbas, director of the interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC),
Booking:
Petra Stegmann
Haus der Kulturen der Welt
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10
10557 Berlin
E-Mail: stegmann@hkw.de