7 documents
Housing
A Tale of Two Huts
Dieter Roelstraete
Architecture Essay
Posted: June 12, 2020
Category
Architecture, Philosophy
Subjects
Housing & Real Estate, Landscape
# 42
The Business: On the Unbearable Lightness of Art
Dieter Roelstraete
Ô Paresse, mère des arts et des nobles vertus, sois le baume des angoisses humaines!
—Paul Lafargue, Le droit à la paresse , 1880
Full disclosure: I grew up the son of an artist, and after more than ten years in the business, I feel it is about time I finally wrote about it. For although this reluctant resolution may simply be motivated by the mundane tragedy of my own private aging, it has become increasingly clear to me in recent years that much of my current thinking about…
e-flux Journal
Posted: February 1, 2013
Category
Sculpture, Installation
Subjects
Immaterial Labor, Minimalism & Post-Minimalism, Post-Fordism, Artistic Research
# 24
On Leaving the Building: Thoughts of the Outside
Dieter Roelstraete
What if, rather than speaking or dreaming of an absolute beginning, we speak of a leap?
— Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846)
1.
A couple of months ago I was invited to the historic Polish port city of Gdańsk by the Wyspa Institute of Art, the city’s leading contemporary art center, to participate in a conference on the work of locally-based artist Grzegorz Klaman—the founder, so it happens, of the art institute that was…
e-flux Journal
Posted: April 1, 2011
Category
Contemporary Art, Aesthetics
Subjects
Relational Aesthetics, Socially Engaged Art
# 16
(Jena Revisited) Ten Tentative Tenets
Dieter Roelstraete
Why does almost everything seem to me like its own parody?
—Adrian Leverkühn in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus
1. The Evanescent
The “Floating World” or “Ukiyo” is the name commonly given to the demimonde of nocturnal pleasures that flourished in Edo-period Japan (1603–1868), specifically in Tokyo’s historic red-light district of Yoshiwara; this era is best remembered today for the flowering of the art of woodblock prints (“ukiyo-e”) that depict various…
e-flux Journal
Posted: May 1, 2010
Category
Contemporary Art
Subjects
Curating, Epistemology
# 11
What is Not Contemporary Art?: The View from Jena
Dieter Roelstraete
Ask not what contemporary art is, but what contemporary art should be.
—Oksana Pasaiko, 2009
I.
“What is contemporary art?” is (clearly) not the same question as “What is art ?” The former basically asks us to define what is particularly “contemporary” about art—not, significantly enough, what is particularly artistic about it. The question of what is “contemporary” about contemporary art seems straightforward enough: answering it would simply require our…
e-flux Journal
Posted: December 1, 2009
Category
Contemporary Art, Philosophy, Aesthetics
# 06
After the Historiographic Turn: Current Findings
Dieter Roelstraete
Promontory
Some weeks ago I was asked by the German quarterly journal Texte zur Kunst to contribute to their upcoming summer issue, loosely organized under the grandiose rubric of “theses on contemporary art,” whose aim would be not so much to define art, but to allow for the staking out of certain positions, which seemed especially important given the confusion resulting from the current “crisis” in the global economy. (The question as to what may happen “after the crisis”…
e-flux Journal
Posted: May 1, 2009
Category
Contemporary Art
Subjects
Historicity & Historiography, Gulf War, Art Market, Financial Crises, Realism
# 04
The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art
Dieter Roelstraete
He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.
—Walter Benjamin 1
[ Preliminary admonition: there is no disgrace in seeking to define either the essence or the attributes of art. For… ]
…art is, or at least can be, many things at many different points in time and space. Throughout its history—which is either long or short, depending on the definition agreed upon—it has assumed many different roles and been called upon to…
e-flux Journal
Posted: March 1, 2009
Category
Contemporary Art
Subjects
Archeology, Historicity & Historiography, Artistic Research