Toward an Aesthetics of Living Beings / Zu einer Ästhetik des Lebendigen Jahresring 62

Texts by Alain Badiou, Karen Barad, Gregory Bateson, Bruce Chatwin, Gilles Deleuze, John Dewey, John Dupré, Sergei Eisenstein, Félix Guattari, Donna Haraway, Alexandre Kojève, Osip Mandelstam, Cord Riechelmann

The question of life has always been one of modernity’s main preoccupations, but it was the advent of the camera—with its ability to record moving creatures—that initiated a new phase in the human investigation of animal behavior. In the world of contemporary art, animals now occupy center stage. Artworks such as Joseph Beuys’s I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), a weeklong performance in New York during which the artist lived with a coyote, and Rosemarie Trockel and Carsten Höller’s Haus für Schweine und Menschen at documenta X (1997), demonstrate the idea that culture, self-consciousness, and language do not exclusively belong to man. Drawing on key texts by Sergei Eisenstein, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Donna Haraway, and analyzing works by Pierre Huyghe, Christoph Keller, and Helen Marten, this volume brings together theory and art, showing how both turned to animals to find new ways of problematizing “life.”

The Jahresring series is edited by Brigitte Oetker and published on behalf of Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e.V.

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