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Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:59:28 PST

Remigration: Postponed. The Architect Paul Bonatz between Turkey and Germany

May, R. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:59:28 PST

In August 1944 Turkey severed diplomatic relations with Germany. Despite the order to leave the country immediately, some five hundred German citizens refused to return to their homeland. Among them was one of the most prominent German architects of those years: Paul Bonatz (1877–1956). Having abandoned his country neither for political nor for racist reasons and having been commissioned for numerous projects in the Third Reich, Bonatz can hardly be integrated into the context of German émigré architects of the Nazi times. The dilemma increases with the problem of pigeonholing his ambiguous personality and confusingly broad oeuvre into a certain scheme, and thus Bonatz so far has been widely ignored in the historiography of architecture. This article tries to help fill this gap by telling the barely studied story of the final phase of Bonatz's career. While he soon was a highly influential adviser and university teacher at the edge of Europe, Bonatz felt unwelcome in his own country after the end of World War II, and it took him until 1954 to return permanently to his homeland. The case of Paul Bonatz, who wandered between two worlds for nearly eleven years, is an exceptionally interesting one in the little-studied field of remigration to Germany after the Nazis' reign.

Modernism Reconsidered: The Kultur-Zivilisation Dichotomy in the Work of Adolf Rading

Barnstone, D. A. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:59:28 PST

Architecture historians have generally posited Kultur and Zivilisation as oppositional values, and aesthetic categories used to "classify" art and architecture production tend to support this division: representational versus abstract art, intuitive versus rational thinking, Gesellschaft versus Gemeinschaft, traditional versus modern, rural versus urban, handicraft versus machine-made. But many important architects, like Adolf Rading in Breslau, who were considered members of the avant-garde did not fully accept or reject modernizing tendencies but embraced modernization and modernism conditionally. In architecture, "modernization" resulted in the invention of new materials and construction or production methods (technology), and the design challenge of new building types like railroad stations, airports, and public housing. "Modernism" refers to the corresponding aesthetic renewal. The ideas and work of a group of architects residing in the Silesian capital city, Breslau, between 1918 and 1932 demonstrate one response to the Kultur-Zivilisation dichotomy. The group included such internationally renowned architects as Max Berg, Ernst May, Hans Poelzig, Hans Scharoun, and Rading. The Breslau group worked with the new formal language and shared the utopian aspirations and progressive politics considered central to the modern project. The architects embraced new materials, functional and rational approaches to space making, and public housing as a central contemporary problem, but they refused to reject history, were both intuitive and Romantic in their work, and regarded technology with suspicion. Their collective attitude could be described as the reconciliation of Kultur and Zivilisation. However it is defined, the Breslau work is important to consider because it gives a picture of the complex ways in which German artists and architects grappled with the simultaneous, and often conflicting, pressures of modernization during the Weimar era.

Uneasy Pleasing: Film as Mass Art

Koch, G. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:59:28 PST

To revive the question about film as mass medium, this essay turns to analyses of Samuel Beckett's Film by Theodor W. Adorno and Gilles Deleuze. Their readings are compared regarding the problem of self-knowledge—and how this epistemic motif is transferred into the cinematic medium. Adorno's more than skeptical position toward film relies on notions of self-reflexivity usually on reserve for high art. When Stanley Cavell situates film as a reflective form of skepticism that binds camera, spectator, and image together, it comes neatly to this position. Adorno at this point does not ascribe to film as film negative qualities, possibly diminishing his reflective capacities. The dispute about the difference between mass art and high art is taken back to the emergence of the notion of culture industry as replacement for mass art in the frame of social theory. Comparing the different outcomes of the positive judgment of the Marx Brothers' films in Adorno and Cavell, one can find the decisive bifurcation that separates their thoughts on film. The tension between opera and film as screened in Marx Brothers at the Opera becomes the touchstone for the differences in value judgment. While for Cavell skepticism is something that pragmatically will be suspended for the sake of constructing a lifeworld bridging opera, film, and life, Adorno stays with the incompatibility of the easy, happy end with art as a reflexive form. Thus Adorno emphasizes the paradox between the wish for wish fulfillment and critical knowledge as the emotional form of ambivalence, insofar as his often-cited harsh judgments on culture industry are countered by a more complex argument about the inherent ambivalence over the aims and issues of (mass) (art).

Mimetic Rationality: Adorno's Project of a Language of Philosophy

Muller, H. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:59:28 PST

Theodor W. Adorno did not produce an explicit philosophy of language but was interested in theoretical and practical problems of language during his entire life. Situating Adorno's language conception within twentieth-century language philosophy and theory, this article reconstructs four suppositions that are constitutive for his way of philosophy: his repudiation of prima philosophia; his plea for a relational, differential construction of concepts; his postulate of radical secularization; and his demand that there should be consequences for the form of representation. The article then clarifies how Adorno positions himself in regard to the conception and critique of language, where he stakes out the position from which he observes, and how he links the critique of society and language, driven by his initial intuition to formulate "philosophy in an authoritative sense, without either systems or ontology." After presenting fundamental aspects of Adorno's theory of language (use of foreign words, tautology, paradox, equivocation), followed by his concepts of constellation, representation (Darstellung), and truth, the article concludes by showing how Adorno's conception of language is linked to that of freedom and how the conception of language, the presumption of freedom, and assumptions about the theory of time are interwoven.

Enlightenment as Religion

Rasch, W. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:59:28 PST

Recent polemical and philosophical claims about modern, secular, liberal, enlightened Europe are examined from the perspective of Europe's relation, past and present, to the non-European world. The notion that Enlightenment reason and liberal institutions represent a higher level of culture because they serve as a universal, neutral medium in contrast to particular religious or ideological worldviews and most especially religious "fundamentalism" is questioned through a discussion of texts by Günter Grass, Jürgen Habermas, Martti Koskenniemi, Carl Schmitt, and Tzvetan Todorov. The legitimacy of Europe's identity as enlightened, secular, and liberal is not denied, only its self-understanding that with Enlightenment (implicitly regarded as the final stage of history) come universality and neutrality. Such a self-understanding contributes to the political problems that rational, "neutral" discourse is meant to solve.

Daniel Richter and the Problem of Political Painting Today

Hughes, D. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:59:28 PST

Over the years, one question has irked critics of Daniel Richter's work more than any other: are his paintings political? For a German artist who began his professional career producing abstract-expressive pictures in 1995, it seemed particularly hard to maintain a left-wing stance while working in a medium that belonged historically to the internationalist conformism of the 1950s. His turn to figuration around 1999–2000, however, only compounded the problem: how dare he raise sensitive political issues—the war in the Balkans, mass unemployment, terrorist bombings, police drug busts, the plight of North Africans trying to reach Europe—without offering a coherent commentary on them? To make matters worse, Richter—for a supposed radical—has made quite a profit from his art while systematically avoiding a clear stance on what purportedly matters most to him. Focusing on three of Richter's best-known paintings—Warum ich kein Konservativer bin (2000), Eine Stadt namens Authen (2001), and Phienox (2000)—I explore the complexities of political painting in today's world. Through a consideration of Richter's neosymbolist style, his postmodern penchant for citation, the influence of the new fauves, and the legacy of socialist realism, I debunk many commonly held myths about leftist art and illustrate how intensely problematic such art has become.