2024.05.06-2024.05.17
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