Session 8a: Aesthetics and Ethics

2nd Global Conference

Friday 12th March – Sunday 14th March 2010
Salzburg, Austria

Towards a Geo-Political Understanding of Architecture
Alison Wolanski
EPFL, Switzerland

Architectural research has often been preoccupied with questions of identity and place as a result of the deep connection between one’s sense of place and the constructed objects that define place. However the theoretical basis for much of that work has been fundamentally challenged by post-modernity. In today’s world, symbolic forms cross boundaries and ideas are implanted in unlikely contexts. While today’s cities are undeniably less restrictive, a general over-saturation of images and ideas has eroded our capacity to contemplate, adapt and integrate them into a sense of collective understanding of urban space. Commerce, meanwhile has gained unprecedented importance. This has led on the one hand to the emergence of generic urban form, and on the other hand to an increasing tendency for architects to employ formal and material hyper-invention in striving for the iconic, to compensate for an aversion to rooted cultural codes as a basis for design.

Unitary theory has been exposed as deeply problematic and few would dare claim today that architectural invention should cease in the interest of creating coherent urban environments. However most people – including a majority of social progressives – confess that the contemporary urban condition is often unsatisfying and disorienting, and express a preference historic buildings. They are willing to pay a premium for historic apartments and to visit places that have a distinct built heritage. In doing so, they are articulating an intuitive preference for urban environments that were generated under more restrictive political, social and economic conditions.

This paper argues that this preference is based in an intuitive understanding that architecture is a formed and formative symbolic actor in socio-political processes, and that the future of architectural theory lies in developing a clearer understanding of the relationship between architecture and collective identity as it applies to the contemporary geo-political world.

Images of the Dead: Ethics and Contemporary Art Practice
Mary O’ Neill
University of Lincoln, United Kingdom

In this paper I will discuss death in the museum in the form of exhibitions of photographic images of the dead focusing on The 1992 Morgue Series by Andreas Serrano, and Life before Death by Walter Schels and Beate Lakotte exhibited at the Welcome Collection in 2008. In recent years there have been a number of exhibitions that have presented us with photographs of the dead that have instigated and contributed to discussions concerning the role of art and the appropriateness of photographing the dead, and have highlighted cultural sensitivities concerning the treatment of the corpse. These exhibitions are often discussed in relation to ethical consideration, however, drawing on the work of Ernest Becker and more recent Terror Management theorists and Zygmunt Bauman, I will posit the argument that the “ethical turn” in discussions of contemporary art is often an avoidance of difficult subjects rather than an engagement with them.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Benjaminian Memory in Contemporary Work of Art
Paula Kuffer
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Starting from the benjaminian sentence that asserts “the historical facts happens to be what strikes us right now: To state them is a task of the memory”, that supposes a copernican turning point into the historiographical field because the historical is not about the reconstruction of the past anymore but about its construction in the present, the current paper deals with the role of the contemporary work of art in the writing of history. From this perspective, the work of art of certain authors that endorse the benjaminian premises by paying special attention to the voices of the oppressed that have been left outside the hegemonic discourse of the progress, is established as a privileged space at the crossroad of ethics and aesthetics. Authors from several disciplines -such as the writer W. G. Sebald, the film director J-L.Godard or the painter A. Kiefer- have introduced a public discourse of the memory that can be seen as a calling for justice of these silenced voices, so they become historians, considering that history is being constructed while being recounted. It is not about reconstructing “the facts” and foreseeing the future, but about paying special attention to the radical innovation, or “utopia” that underlies the present. The interpretation of these works will be approached from the idea of “dialectic image”, an aesthetical category that determines the political perception of history, where now and then unite as a lightning in a constellation generating a collision between past and present. That is why in a work of art, understood as an instant fully lived with the tensions and contradictions of a certain historical moment, the “now of the legibility” is the place where the real historian is located, the one that feels responsible for the past, and from where the history of the defeated can be safed from being forgotten.