Speaker

Wang Pu

Host

Liu Tian

Introduction

Through lectures and discussions, we will become a ‘community’ of ‘outliers’ whose existence has only one possibility: to read Benjamin, to study the history of criticism, to study experience, history, and to regard art as the absolute medium. In other words, we are the after-life of Benjamin’s prose, and thus enter into  the historical problems of the work of art. Yes, it’s about the (non-) possibility of a work of art: criticability, transferability, translatability, quotability, replicability, recognizability. The question that we assume from Benjamin about the work of art is that of pure language and the Messiah, monad and dialectical images, allegory and ruin, commodity and spirit, the availability of channels, the end of the Bourgeois and the (technological) revolution of the universal body. In this community, in the new ‘experience and poverty’ of this new age, are works of art our ‘arcades’ (passages), planetariums, and ‘windowless truths’?

Course Outline

Part One: The Possibility of Art Criticism

May 6 | Lecture 1: Criticability: The Concept of Criticism

May 7 | Lecture 2: Quotability: Constellations of Origin

May 8 | Lecture 3: Translatability: The Later Life of A Work

Part Two: Avant-garde Art, Avant-garde Politics

May 9 | Lecture 4: The Avant-garde · One-way Street · Earthly Enlightenment

May 10 | Lecture 5: The Soviet Union · Producers · Poor Experience

May 13 | Lecture 6: Brecht and the Expressionism Debate

14 May | Lecture 7: Replicability: Technological Media

Part Three: Waking Up from the Bourgeois Century

15 May | Lecture 8: Arcades · Dialectical Imagery · Citations

16 May | Lecture 9: The End of Baudelaire and Bourgeois

Part IV: Summary or Passage: Art and History

May 17 | Lecture 10: Commodities and Spirituality

May 17 | Lecture 11: Recognizability: The Moment and the Angel