This workshop is part of the SNSF-funded research project “Real Abstractions: Reconsidering Realisms Role of the Present” (Fribourg University / Lucerne School of Art and Design). Principal Investigators: Wolfgang Brückle, Julia Gelshorn; Organisation: Tobias Ertl
Participation is free, registration (by e-mail to ) is appreciated.
Program here.
WORKSHOP
The Aesthetics of Real Abstraction
Sami Khatib, Orient-Institut Beirut
part of the Workshop: Artistic Realism and Social Abstraction: Constructing Reality in Contemporary Art and Theory
23-24.11.23, University of Fribourg
In 20th-century critical realism, society as an object of artistic representation and critique was perceived to be more and more abstract and intangible. This prompted calls for a realism which sought to critically construct social reality rather than merely represent or document it.
Marxist theories argue that in capitalist modernity, reality is permeated by abstractions. These abstractions take various forms, including the economic logic of monetary exchange relations and abstract labor, the universalizing legal form of the modern subject abstracted from gen-dered, racialized and class domination, as well as the increasing technological mediation of social life. In these examples, abstraction is not to be understood as a conceptual detachment from reality, but as a social practice operative within it. Our workshop puts social abstraction to the test of contemporary art:
Does the legacy of constructive realism provide artistic practice with resources that help cope with social abstraction? Can we conceive of a productive notion of realism beyond modernist or postmodernist versions of constructing the real? Can the concept of social abstraction open new paths for understanding the condition of contemporary realism?