'Ethics and Aesthetics' Talks series at Tate Modern
Diarmuid Costello
Co-organised by Dominic Willsdon, Tate Modern, and
Diarmuid Costello, Oxford Brookes University.
A series of events which pairs internationally renowned theorists,
inviting each to give a give a lecture, and respond to the other, and the=
n
to audience questions, on the relationship between ethics and aesthetics.
To book tickets:
By telephone, call 020 7887 8888
Online, visit www.tate.org.uk/tickets
J M Bernstein & Judith Butler
Starr Auditorium
Friday 1 October 14.30-18.00
£8 (£6 concessions)
J M BERNSTEIN - In Praise of Pure Violence
In discussions of art in recent years, there has been what Jay Bernstein
calls 'a curious re-emergence of beauty talk'. His response, in this
paper, is to provide a reminder of the 'violent' presuppositions of
modernism and why they are unavoidable. He does this in part by
contrasting the willful violence of the paintings of Francis Bacon (with
reference to the opening chapter of Gilles Deleuze's book Francis Bacon:
the Logic of Sensation) with the pure violence of Henri Matisse's
paintings.
JUDITH BUTLER - Non-Violent Violence
In his essay 'A Critique of Violence', Walter Benjamin makes a distinctio=
n
between mythic and divine violence. Divine violence, exemplified in the
notion of the proletariat strike, takes aim at legal violence or state
coercion. There is a contrast between a mythic violence that instates
guilt and centers on the figure of Niobe and a divine violence that seeks
expiation from guilt and the opening up of a very specific version of
messianism. Judith Butler explores the consequences of this latter
formulation: from the uses of Jewish theology, to issues of aesthetic
representation, to the idea that divine violence might be 'non-violent'
and what that might mean forms of 'violence' that oppose state violence i=
n
the present day.
J M Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the
New School University, New York and is the author of The Fate of Art,
Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, and (forthcoming) Against Voluptuous
Bodies: Adorno's Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting.
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative
Literature at the University of California, Berkeley and is the author of
Gender Trouble, Excitable Speech: Politics of the Performative, Precariou=
s
Life: the Power of Mourning and Violence and Undoing Gender.
Howard Caygill & Thierry de Duve
Starr Auditorium
Friday 15 October 14.30-18.00
£8 (£6 concessions)
The second in a series of events which pairs internationally renowned
theorists, inviting each to give a give a lecture, and respond to each
other, and then to audience questions, on the relationship between ethics
and aesthetics. Chaired by Diarmuid Costello (Oxford Brookes University).
HOWARD Caygill - The Destruction of Art
Why does the destruction of art provoke such ambivalent ethical affects -
sorrow or exhilaration? The answer is usually sought using the religious
concept of 'iconoclasm' or its more recent secular derivative
'iconoclash'. But perhaps it is necessary to forge new concepts for
understanding the destruction of art, and, by implication, its 'right to
life'. Perhaps the clue to the discovery of such concepts lies in the
'work' character of the work of art rather than in its iconicity? Perhap=
s
the source of the ethical affect that attends its destruction lies more i=
n
its singularity as a work than in its function of representation?
THIERRY DE DUVE - Do artists speak on behalf of all of us?
It is De Duve's conviction 1) that when it comes to understanding what is
at stake when we utter aesthetic judgments, Kant basically "got it right"=
;
and 2) that a change of episteme since Kant's time has made some
amendments to the Critique of Judgment necessary. One aspect of this
change is the crisis of representation synonymous with modernity, which i=
s
among other things a crisis of representativity affecting the legitimacy
of artists to speak on behalf of all of us. Focusing on Kant's idea of th=
e
sensus communis, he argues 1) that in spite of this crisis, the notion of
artists speaking on behalf of all of us is essential to the practice and
theory of art; 2) that its legitimacy does not hinge on the artist's
purportedly universal mandate but rather on the artwork's universal
address.
Howard Caygill is Professor of Historical and Cultural Studies at
Goldsmiths College, University of London, and author of Walter Benjamin:
The Colour of Experience and Levinas and the Political.
Thierry de Duve is Professor of Art History at the University of Lille II=
I
and the author of Pictorial Nominalism, Kant after Duchamp and Look.
Noel Carroll & Adrian Piper
Starr Auditorium
Friday 5 November 14.30-18.00
£8 (£6 concessions)
Chaired by Diarmuid Costello (Oxford Brookes University).
NOEL CARROLL - Art and Alienation
Through Modernist practice and aesthetic philosophy, ambitious art has
been alienated from social life. In contrast to more traditional views,
morality and politics, for example, are not considered topics to which ar=
t
qua art has anything to contribute. Moreover, an adversarial stance
toward the rest of society is also a feature, though in a different way,
of much postmodernist art which takes its business to be cultural
criticism. As a result of these tendencies, the artworld, with a great
deal of philosophical assistance, has marginalized itself from the broade=
r
society. Carroll's talk will diagnose these developments, ciriticize
their philosophical foundations, and make limited suggestions about
dealing with this impasse.
ADRIAN PIPER - Political Art and the Paradigm of Innovation
The marketing of new art and the canonization of senior artists by the
media, galleries and museums disconfirm postmodernist claims that
originality and innovation are no longer values or goals in contemporary
art. Indeed, the rhetoric of innovation in art plays the same central rol=
e
in promoting such work that it plays in promoting the creation of desire
and the consumption of commodities and services in a free-market
capitalist culture more generally. However, the economic and political
requirements of such a culture place rigid constraints on the scope of
artistic innovation possible within it, such that no artistic innovation
that seriously undermines its very traditional power relations is
acceptable. Hence political art that satisfies those constraints is
rewarded for its impotence, while political art that violates them is
punished for its effectiveness. Maintaining a sharp distinction between
innovation and progress clarifies this dynamic.
Noel Carroll is Monroe C. Beardsley Professor of the Philosophy of Art at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the author of A Philosophy of
Mass Art, Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays and several works in
film theory including Theorizing the Moving Image.
Adrian Piper is a conceptual artist (whose work focuses on issues of race=
)
and a philosopher. Retrospectives of her art have toured major venues in
Europe and the USA in recent years. Her main philosophical publications
are in metaethics and the history of ethics, including the two volume
Rationality and the Structure of the Self. Out of Order, Out of Sight:
Selected Writings in Meta-Art and Art Criticism 1967-1993 is a collection
of her art writings.
W J T Mitchell & Griselda Pollock
Starr Auditorium
Friday 26 November 14.30-18.00
£8 (£6 concessions)
Chaired by Dominic Willsdon (Tate Modern).
W J T MITCHELL - Cloning Terror: The Contemporary War of Images
Mitchell's talk will take up the ethical and political dimensions of
visual images (in photography and video) of war and terrorism from
September 11, 2001 to the present moment. It will discuss the ways that
images take on 'lives of their own' in the age of terrorism, and
specifically the new forms of life made possible by the digitization of
the image, the cloning of organisms, and the peculiar role of imagination
and fantasy in the dissemination of terror.
GRISELDA POLLOCK - The Graces of Catastrophe: Looking Back, Repeating and
Moving On
Griselda Pollock's current work converges interestingly with Tom
Mitchell's in that she is also interested in issues of the image and
catastrophe but from a historical point of view and in terms of the
relations between photography and painting. Her talk will consider the
image and the gaze in the field of trauma and catastrophe in the
historical era of the photographic encounter and painting 'after
painting'. The framing will be psychoanalytical as a mode of historical
analysis.
W J T Mitchell is Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of
English and Art History, Committee on Art and Design at the University of
Chicago, and author of Picture Theory and Iconology: Image, Text,
Ideology.
Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art at
the University of Leeds, Director of the AHRB CentreCATH, and author of
Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art and
Differencing the Canon: Feminism and the Histories of Art.
----------------------
Dr. Diarmuid Costello
Senior Lecturer in The Theory of Art
& Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow
School of Arts and Humanities
Richard Hamilton Building
Headington Hill Campus
Oxford Brookes University
Oxford OX3 0BP
tel. 01865 484982
fax. 01865 484952
http://ah.brookes.ac.uk/art/staff/diarmuidcostello/
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