{"id":781,"date":"2012-06-08T13:17:11","date_gmt":"2012-06-08T13:17:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/?page_id=781"},"modified":"2012-06-08T13:17:44","modified_gmt":"2012-06-08T13:17:44","slug":"art-as-phantasmagoria-between-illusion-and-reification","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/?page_id=781","title":{"rendered":"Art as \u2018Phantasmagoria\u2019: Between Illusion and Reification"},"content":{"rendered":"

Participant: M\u00e1rio Vieira de Carvalho
\nAffiliation: Universidade Nova de Lisboa
\nFormat: Presentation and Conversation
\nThemes<\/a>: recursion, paradigm, praxis<\/p>\n

Stockhausen\u2019s infamous comment that the destruction of the twin towers in New York in September 11, 2001, was \u201cthe greatest work of art that ever existed\u201d raises crucial questions about the relationship between art and politics, art and ethics, also on the very concept of \u201cartwork\u201d. By focusing on art as a system of communication, I argue that the particular concept of artwork that is behind Stockhausen\u2019s aestheticizing of destruction corresponds to the radicalization of the \u201corganic metaphor\u201d, which culminates by 1950 with Stockhausen\u2019s paradigm shift to the ideal of a self-produced work of music (described in terms that are very similar avant la lettre to the concept of autopoiesis, coined by Maturana). Although produced by human labor, the artwork should emerge and act as if it was self-produced, \u201cautopoietic\u201d, like an organism, a second nature.<\/p>\n

The focus of the avant-garde on the work of music as a dehumanized, reified object, in this most achieved version, has its counterpart in the Western hegemonic paradigm of artistic communication (both of \u201chigh\u201d and mass culture) relying on devices of \u201cperfect illusion\u201d and leading the spectator\u2019s or listener\u2019s feed back only to what is represented, not to the code of representation.<\/p>\n

So different and opposed paradigms of communication are both asymmetric and characterized by a drastic reduction of complexity, in that they either radicalize the \u201cpure aesthetic gaze\u201d or \u201cpure aesthetic listening\u201d, in terms of suppressing the structural coupling of art and life-world (its values, beliefs, emotional experiences), or they potentially expose the spectator or listener to manipulation, as if art had lost its autonomy as a communication system with its own code and dissolved entirely in its social environment. \u201cReification\u201d and \u201cillusion\u201d, by concealing the production process involved in the artwork, could be described as \u201cphantasmagorias\u201d (similarly to Marx\u2019s commodity fetishism). A cybernetic approach, by contrast, highlights the network of recursive processes involving all partners (including active, meaning-producing-listeners\/spectators) and the truth-content of artistic communication (claimed by both Adorno and Bateson). It may, thus, contribute to better bring together artistic theory and praxis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Participant: M\u00e1rio Vieira de Carvalho Affiliation: Universidade Nova de Lisboa Format: Presentation and Conversation Themes: recursion, paradigm, praxis Stockhausen\u2019s infamous comment that the destruction of the twin towers in New York in September 11, 2001, was \u201cthe greatest work of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":26,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-781","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=781"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":784,"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/781\/revisions\/784"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/26"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asc-cybernetics.org\/2012\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}