Syllabus
14.2. Introduction: Art & Propaganda I. (Hannah Arendt)21.2.
History of Violence (Walter Benjamin)28.2. Art & Revolt, Cartesian Doubts & The Temptaion of Ruins I. 7.3.
Art & Revolt, Cartesian Doubts & The Temptaion of Ruins II.14.3. Art & Propaganda II., field trip: Karel Otto Hrubý (GHMP) (7. 3. 2023 – 21. 5. 2023)21.3: Field trip: The Melancholy of Cézanne (National Gallery, Prague)28.3: Field trip: The Avant-Garde and Violence (National Gallery, Prague)4.4.
Field trip: Margita Titlová: Purpurová vertikála (GHMP) (15. 2. 2023 – 14. 5. 2023)11.4. Field trip: Eva Koťátková: My Body Is Not an Island (NG Prague) (7/12 2022—4/62023)18.4.
Field trip: Markéta Magidová: Moje sladká nejedlá planeta (Kunsthalle)25.4. Field trip: Center for Contemporary Arts Prague2.5.
Field trip: Trafo Gallery Prague9.5. Forensic Aesthetics, Speculative Aestheticcs and Violence16.5.
Concluding field trip: Art in Public Places (Holešovice, Prague)
Annotation
The course will confront contemporary art with selected philosophical texts and essays, following a question that has haunted the avant-garde movement ever since it started. If art is supposed to negate all the restraints and norms that the world imposes on it, does not a murder - as a radical action - represent an ultimate temptation of avant-garde art (as thematized by Lars von Trier in The House that Jack Built, 2018)? Naturally, such a conclusion would be wholly absurd.
However, it provokes a series of questions of prime importance for contemporary art: issues of limits of art, its relation to politics, public space, life, etc. As for the topics, we will discuss the relationship between art and politics, art and freedom, art and its critical potential, limits of art, paradoxes of the avant-garde movement, alienation of the contemporary world, etc. We will also read the excerpts from authors like Adorno, Chalupecký, Rancière or Danto.