On June 14 at 15:00 in online format will be held the presentation of the third issue of the bulletin of art criticism "Termit", which is the product of a year's work of the Laboratory of Art Criticism of Winzavod (together with the Institute "Base"). You can register for the presentation by the link.
The previous issue was devoted to the conservative acceptance of the reality of capitalism as a new turn in theoretical thought of the last decade.
Continuing the research started earlier this year, the laboratory turned to another aspect of the problem of reality - the production of art in capitalist society.
The authors are trying to answer some important questions:
- Is art, as a form of consciousness that has clear historical patterns, to be reconciled with the capitalist exhaustiveness of reality?
- Has the lack of reality, which has always driven art, turned into its excess today, ready to strangle any historical goal-setting of the artistic?
- Is it even possible to have historical ambitions in art - or has it become a commodity of one day, fashion, Baudelaire modernity, drawings by Constantin Guys?
- Ultimately, does contemporary art produce endless modernity - or does it still have an emancipatory potential?
The framework for answering these questions is posed by three very different texts representing different traditions of art criticism. These are a fragment of Michael Fried's Courbet's Realism, an abridged version of a report by William Roberts, English art historian, on realism by Allan Sekula, and Hito Steyerl's Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War.
Against this background, the discussion about realism in the issue developed in the following directions. In his critical speech, Anatoly Osmolovsky defends realism as a non-inclusion in the dominant picture of the world and as a critical distance; Konstantin Bokhorov speaks about realism as reflection by the very art of its mechanisms of production and ontologization; Egor Sofronov discusses the grassroots level of functioning of reality, reducing the emancipatory potential of realism to the garbage crisis of modern overproduction. Finally, Boris Klushnikov speaks about the point of view adopted in the contemporary discussion of realism and materialism.
The participants of the Laboratory of Art Criticism in the discussion on realism are represented by three publications. Maria Koroleva discusses the problem of the observer's place in the modern world picture, which is formed by artificial intelligence and big data. Anastasia Nefedova, using the example of Australian artist Simon Denny, raises the question of the failure of critical delocalization in installations that involve the audience in the perceptual reflection of digital technology. And Anna Ushakova, doing a review of a photography exhibition in post-Maydan Kiev, once again returns to the role of photography in reflecting social transformations.
The presentation will be attended by the permanent experts of the laboratory: Anatoly Osmolovsky, Egor Sofronov, Boris Klushnikov and Konstantin Bokhorov, as well as graduates of the LHC, critics: Anna Ushakova, Maria Koroleva and Anastasia Nefedova.
The issuing editor of the issue is Konstantin Bokhorov.
The Bulletin is a printed edition of the Laboratory of Art Critics, which accumulates the results of each cycle.
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