SFB 626:  Esthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: from 2003 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 5485744

• Final Report Year: 2015

Final Report Abstract

The Collaborative Research Centre 626 has stressed different aspects of its research topic – 'aesthetic experience' and the 'dissolution of artistic limits' – during the three funding phases. The first phase focussed on examining the aesthetic experience. The second phase turned to the question of dissolution. In the third, it was the problems of form, aesthetic judgment and space. The construction of the entire CRC brought together sub-projects from disciplines that have the various art forms as their object (art history, literary studies, musicology, theater, dance, and film studies) with disciplines, such as religion studies, philosophy or psychology, which also examine 'experience' and the 'dissolution of limits' with respect to phenomena that at first glance seem not to be pertinent to either art or the nominalized 'aesthetic'. The central approaches that were to be discussed here determine the relationship between art and other fields of experience, such as belief, knowledge, cultural tradition etc. The focus here lies in examining those aesthetic operations that are geared toward dissolving the limits of the individual arts and toward those theoretical determinations that pursue dissolution, for instance of aesthetic experience, as political or religious. This gave rise to an internal differentiation of the question during the second phase: How can the claim to an explicit political aesthetics be reformulated and dismantled into questions of participation, the sensus communis and the model of action of more recent art forms? The art-comparative approach, which pointed out connections, emphasized a further desideratum: taking into account the role of mediality, which obviously became a kind of hinge between procedures of dissolution. Which medium comes to bear in procedures of dissolution determines, among other things, where and how the limit will be dissolved (does, for instance, the use of video on stage in the music theatre of Christoph Schlingensief or Heiner Goebbels initiate a dissolution in the direction of film or in the direction of the performance aesthetics of a live broadcast?). New forms of paragon discourse can be held up against an undifferentiated thesis of global dissolution, forms that are usually rejected as an ontological claim of essentialist media specificity. This has meant that it is precisely aesthetic operations of dissolution in artistic practice that have so precisely thematized the difference between the arts, which have recently also appeared as thoroughly competitive. In these emphases, the interweaving of language, image, music and technical media have been specifically pursued. The research results of the last two phases produced the followed desiderata. Both of the basic terms, 'aesthetic experience' and 'dissolution of limits', can no longer be conceived as static, but must be defined much more precisely as temporal, processual and relational. Experiences are had in the dual sense of an actual occurrence, characterized by its temporal expanse, its mental process and its relational linking connections. Someone is currently having an experience of something, or has just had the experience of something. This is where another question arose for us: that of what carries such shifts. To clarify this question we started from a term introduced from heuristics: generic forms. We distinguish 'generic forms' from the traditional term genre, which is defined by codes and conventions, but also from structurally conceived concepts of the generative. Rather, we understand generic forms as those that are defined generally enough to act as a passe-partout to exceed the limits of genres, symbols, etc.. If, for instance, fiction or comedy is reduced to a genre, its scope is not exhausted. Rather, it is a matter of illuminating those formal dynamics that crisscross the genres and do not inscribe any teleological end form. The second emphasis draws on an old topic in aesthetics: the aesthetic judgment. Here as well, we were not primarily interested in providing the contours of the Kantian term in intellectual history, but in the procedural aspects of judgment as a component inscribed in both having experiences as well as in the vectorial definition of dissolving limits. Our interest draws primarily on the question of forming judgment, which leads us to no longer view an object, regardless of its institutional denomination, as aesthetic or as belonging to a particular art. This leads us to the third emphasis, the spaces of experience. These function as framings (museum or street, etc.) within which objects are judged, but also as the materializations of dissolving limits. Especially the play between mental processes of experiencing time (length of stay, rhythm, etc.) and the spatial extension and exceeding of the space of art. The research goal was thus to reformulate the basic terms and to adjust the degree to which they are appropriate to explaining contemporary art.

Publications

• Dimensionen ästhetischer Erfahrung, 1. Aufl., Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 1640, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003
  Joachim Küpper (Hg.)
  
• Ästhetik der Installation, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003
  Juliane Rebentisch
  
• Ästhetische Erfahrung im Zeichen der Entgrenzung der Künste. Epistemische, ästhetische und religiöse Formen von Erfahrung im Vergleich, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft: Sonderheft 4, Hamburg: Meiner, 2004
  Gert Mattenklott (Hg.)
  
• Art and Cognition! Consequences for experimental aethetics, in: Bulletin of Psychology and the Arts 5/2 (2005), S. 11-20
  Helmut Leder, Dorothee Augustin, Benno Belke
  
• Zwischen Ding und Zeichen. Zur ästhetischen Erfahrung in der Kunst, München/Paderborn: Fink, 2005
  Gertrud Koch, Christiane Voss (Hg.)
  
• Kunst, Fortschritt, Geschichte, Kaleidogramme 5, Berlin: Kadmos, 2006
  Christoph Menke, Juliane Rebentisch (Hg.)
  
• Sprachen ästhetischer Erfahrung, Paragrana, Bd. 15, H. 2, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006
  Gert Mattenklott, Martin Vöhler (Hg.)
  
• Subjekt und Medium in der Kunst der Moderne, Berlin / Zürich: Diaphanes, 2006
  Christoph Menke, Michael Lüthy (Hg.)
  
• Bildtext - Textbild. Probleme der Rede über Text-Bild-Hybride, 1. Aufl., Rombach Wissenschaften: Reihe Cultura 43, Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2007
  Dirck Linck; Stefanie Rentsch (Hg.)
  
• How to Do Things with Art, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2007 (engl. Aufl. 2010)
  Dorothea von Hantelmann
  
• Randgänge der Zeichnung, München/Paderborn: Fink, 2007
  Werner Busch, Oliver Jehle, Carolin Meister (Hg.)
  
• The Osmotic Dynamics of Romanticism. Observing Nature – Representing Experience 1800-1850, Berlin: Reimer, 2007
  Erna Fiorentini (Hg.)
  
• Bewegte Erfahrungen: zwischen Emotionalität und Ästhetik, Zürich / Berlin: Diaphanes, 2008
  Anke Hennig, Brigitte Obermayr; Antje Wessels, Marie-Christin Wilm (Hg.)
  
• Inspiration und Adaptation. Tarnkappen mittelalterlicher Autorschaft, Hildesheim: Weidmann, 2008
  Renate Schlesier, Beatrice Trinca (Hg.)
  
• Jacques Rancière: Ist Kunst widerständig?, Berlin: Merve, 2008
  Jan Völker, Frank Ruda (Hg.)
  
• Kraft. Zu einem Grundbegriff ästhetischer Anthropologie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008
  Christoph Menke
  
• Das unklassische Bild. Von Tizian bis Constable und Turner, München: Beck, 2009
  Werner Busch
  
• Form. Zwischen Ästhetik und künstlerischer Praxis, Zürich / Berlin: Diaphanes, 2009
  Armen Avanessian, Franck Hofmann, Susanne Leeb, Hans Stauffacher (Hg.)
  
• Georg Kreisler – Grenzgänger, Rombach Wissenschaften, Reihe Litterae 169, Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2009
  Michael Custodis, Albrecht Riethmüller (Hg.)
  
• Grenzen der Katharsis in den modernen Künsten. Transformationen des aristotelischen Modells seit Bernays, Nietzsche und Freud, Berlin / New York: de Gruyter, 2009
  Martin Vöhler, Dirck Linck (Hg.)
  
• Un-Reinheit. Konzepte und Praktiken im Kulturvergleich, München/Paderborn, 2009
  Angelika Malinar (Hg.)
  
• Vita aesthetica. Szenarien ästhetischer Lebendigkeit, Zürich / Berlin : Diaphanes, 2009
  Winfried Menninghaus, Armen Avanessian, Jan Völker (Hg.)
  
• Die Mimesis und ihre Künste, München/Paderborn: Fink, 2010
  Gertrud Koch, Christiane Voss, Martin Vöhler (Hg.)
  
• Improvisieren: Paradoxien des Unvorhersehbaren. Kunst – Medien – Praxis, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010
  Gabriele Brandstetter, Annemarie M. Matzke (Hg.)
  
• Jetzt und dann. Zeitkonzepte in Philosophie und Medien, München/Paderborn: Fink, 2010
  Gertrud Koch, Anke Hennig,Georg Witte (Hg.)
  
• Kunsthandeln, Zürich / Berlin: Diaphanes, 2010
  Karin Gludovatz, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Michael Lüthy, Bernhard Schieder (Hg.)
  
• Realismus in den Künsten der Gegenwart, Zürich / Berlin: Diaphanes, 2010
  Dirck Linck, Michael Lüthy; Brigitte Obermayr, Martin Vöhler (Hg.)
  
• Ästhetisierung : der Streit um das Ästhetische in Politik, Religion und Erkenntnis, Zürich / Berlin: Diaphanes, 2010
  Ilka Brombach, Dirk Setton, Cornelia Temesvári (Hg.)
  
• Imaginäre Medialität – Immaterielle Medien, München/Paderborn: Fink, 2012
  Gertrud Koch, Kirsten Maar, Fiona McGovern (Hg.)
  
• Screen Dynamics. Mapping the Borders of Cinema, Wien: Synema, 2012
  Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg, Simon Rothöhler (Hg.)
  
• Der Leihkörper, München/Paderborn: Fink, 2013
  Christiane Voss
  
• Form und Wirkung. Phänomenologische und empirische Kunstwissenschaft in der Sowjetunion der 1920er Jahre, München/Paderborn: Fink, 2013
  Brigitte Obermayr, Georg Witte, Aage Hansen-Löve (Hg.)
  
• Konturen des Kunstwerks. Zur Frage von Relevanz und Kontingenz (Bd. der SFB-Jahrestagung 2011), München/Paderborn: Fink, 2013
  Frédéric Döhl, Daniel Martin Feige, Thomas Hilgers, Fiona McGovern (Hg.)
  
• Performance and the Politics of Space. Theatre and Topology, London / New York: Routledge, 2013
  Erika Fischer-Lichte, Benjamin Wihstutz
  
• Assign and Arrange. Methodologies of Presentation in Art and Dance, Berlin: Sternberg, 2014
  Maren Butte, Kirsten Maar, Fiona McGovern, Marie-France Rafael, Jörn Schafaff (Hg.)
  
• Kunst als menschliche Praxis. Eine Ästhetik, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014
  Georg W. Bertram
  
• Mechanische Verlebendigung. Ästhetische Erfahrung im Kino, München/Paderborn: Fink, 2014
  Chris Tedjasukmana
  
• Zitieren, appropriieren, sampeln. Referenzielle Verfahren in den Gegenwartskünsten, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014
  Renate Wöhrer, Frédéric Döhl (Hg.)
  
• Affekt und Urteil, München/Paderborn: Fink, 2015
  Thomas Hilgers, Gertrud Koch, Christoph Möllers und Sabine Müller-Mall (Hg.)
  
• Kunst und Wirklichkeit heute, Affirmation – Kritik – Transformation, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015
  Lotte Everts, Johannes Lang, Michael Lüthy, Bernhard Schieder (Hg.)