Change, break, crisis, or fulguration – what is a turn in art?
Journal Title: Art Inquiry. Recherches sur les arts - Year 2015, Vol 0, Issue
Abstract
The aim of the article is to find the main determinants of the changes/transformations in art that would satisfy the necessary conditions for defining some phenomenon as a ‘turn’. The first part of the study presents some attempts to specify the nature of a cultural turn, and the methodological positions offered by the contemporary humanities. The point of departure here is the conception of Doris Bachmann-Medick. Assuming that the inflation of cultural turns is a signal of profound change, we will ask about the impact of such processes on art. It is not a question of the response of art to changes, but of art as a fragment of the changed reality. In this context, the article refers to Umberto Eco’s concept of art as an epistemological metaphor of reality and Mieczysław Wallis’s theory of continuity/discontinuity, or gradual and abrupt changes in art. The concepts characteristic of the early stages of modern consciousness have been tested according to the criteria for the contemporary understanding of transformation in art, termed ‘a turn’. For this purpose, we have considered the different meanings of the concept of ‘change/transformation’ and of the concept of ‘turn’. The material used as an example is the history of the reception of Art Nouveau, and the problem of radicalness of the avant-garde turn. The final part of the study discusses different uses of the concept of turn, employed in art in recent years. Two ‘turns’ have been distinguished; an affective turn, linked with the somatic one, and a social turn. Both of them can be treated as constituents of a culture-wide turn: the performative turn. The postulated direction of the research on contemporary turns in art is finding a new formula of esthetic experience.
Authors and Affiliations
Teresa Pękala
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP315784
- DOI -
- Views 103
- Downloads 0
The Art of Women – form the Margin to the Mainstream
Confronting the second wave of feminism with postfeminism allows us to show the change in the perception of art and the position of women in the art world. The activists of the 1970s aroused extreme emotions in the publi...
Avant-gardists and primitivism
Today, the relations between modern art with primitive art are almost legendary. Contemporary appreciation of non-European artists’ contribution to the development of modern art was reflected, for instance, in the ground...
The Contemporary Dilemmas of Narcissus and Pygmalion. A Study of the Aesthetics of Life.
This article presents two characters from the Greek mythology: Narcissus and Pygmalion. They are two different symbols of human destiny, who share a hyperactive attitude towards unreality/fiction. In their case, what exi...
Adorno and practically useless art, or autonomy instead of avant-garde
Adorno’s aesthetic theory allows us to treat him as an anti-theorist of the avant-garde. We can find in his work many accurate observations grasping the essence of the changes that were introduced by this artistic format...
The avant-garde as a movement towards the present
This text attempts to reconsider the threads of topicality and happening as the factors defining the artistic avant-garde movement, understood as a creative formation with identifiable common assumptions that transcend d...