mahr'svierteljahrsschriftfürästhetik
8 (2005), Nr.1/March
Aesthetica
Touchy Matters or What Kind of
Space Is This? On
thesis
architecture
the drug scene
under pressure
a square - not public, yet homeless
rather than resistance:
interzones!
(media)
aesthetics, ltd.
thesis
The problem and chance: The center of Vienna Karlsplatz square is
defined by drug addicts. The solution: aesthetic perception, not legal and
urban design.
„Er geht auf der Stroßn
sagt ned wohin
[...]“
Falco 1982
architecture
A failure of the arts in the widest sense, not only because of
misplanning the area from the outset, with effects for centuries. Already
architect Johann Fischer von Erlach contributed to this in paradoxically
building a monumental church with a fragmentary, contradictory facade (Venturi
1977, 32, 84f.) - today Karlplatz 10 - originally situated in a
poor and rural neighbourhood outside the town wall and strangely oriented
exactly to the imperial center of early 18th century metropolis
However some „minor“ interzones remained. Was it because of topographic
or traffic circumstances? One spot of the Ringstrasse area was not
„domesticated“. The connection of river Wienfluß with its accompanying streets
to Karlsplatz was marked ineffectively by the first white cube Vienna Secession
(1898) and 1920ies’ Österreichisches Verkehrsbüro both of them belonging to
Friedrichstraße today. Also the way of the river covered soon deflected a
straightforward design of the area now called square. Accordingly, a city
railway line was constructed along the river entering the square and
subterraneously leaving it. Two little, but effectively situated Venetian
(Denise Scott Brown) art nouveau „pavillions“ for the stop were designed by
Otto Wagner to form a subtle answer to the two side chapels of Karlskirche
undermining the primary principle of squares: no buildings on it.
The difficulties of managing the crossing of streets on Karlsplatz
increased with the growth of 20th century traffic. The Akademie der bildenden
Künste, although bordering to Karlsplatz only with its backside, today is
seperated completely from Karlsplatz by a street. So is the Künstlerhaus -
Karlsplatz 5 - , an exhibition space today that also houses a movie theater and
a theater for contemporary plays. From here subterranean Künstlerhauspassage
arcade (including an atrium) is connected to Resselpark. Also some earlier mistakes
appear to be obstacles for improving the quality of the square. As seen today
the Technische Universität - Karlsplatz 13 - was pulled a bit too far into what
could have become a square by surface design. Like the high school
Handelsakademie of would-be Karlsplatz 5 opposite to Technische Universität the
would-be Karlsplatz 6 Musikverein was neither oriented to Ringstraße nor to
Karlsplatz. And the comparatively small Wien Museum - would-be Karlsplatz 8 -
built after 1945 does not meet the quality of the good historicist buildings
here that defines a good „square“. Go to map of
To this difficult urban situation adds a landscape/gardening design as
if the area had not been defined as a square in the first place. Landscape is
suggested by slightly different niveaus in altitude as indicated by the
pavillions on „top“ of the area. Gardening tasks are further suggested by the
simple fact of the size of the area probably too big for designing a square. In
fact, what we have in mind with calling Karlsplatz today for the better part
consists of and really is Resselpark. This is a garden containing a cafeteria,
playing grounds, rare plants and trees, a beautiful large oval basin containing
an organic modernist sculpture and monuments of two inventors and one composer.
Superficially spoken, Karlsplatz consists of three fifths of the area covered
with Resselpark, one fifth taken by streets and another fifth for the rest
including a second cafeteria, smaller monuments and street peninsulas.
In addition to the „exterior“ design resulting from surrounding
architecture the light-weight Karlsplatz square since the 1970es contains
aspects of an „interior“ design. With the construction of three subway lines
crossing or running into the square more urban design failure was in the making.
Besides the labyrinthic passenger system connecting subway lines there is a
most notable subterranean arcade/passage. For it is an extension of one of few
passages that underpass the Ringstraße boulevard since 1955. It now runs into a
subterranean shop arcade - including, on the same level, a tiny plaza - leading
people from the National Opera in first district to fourth district crossing
the longish Karlsplatz square on the short side. The solution chosen also
provides little entrances equipped with escalators for Ringstraße and
Karlsplatz as well as a more generous and more carefully resolved pedestrian
entrance on the lower level in the mid of Karlsplatz that runs into Resselpark
and opens toward fourth district.
So today there are a series of predominantly beautiful buildings in
historicist and with few exceptions modern style, a lot of streets and,
topographically, a garden area that is connected to the Ringstraße with
sidewalks and passages underneath. In terms of the square logics and aesthetics
this adds to nothing exciting and a bundle of contradictions that have caused
some pressure with the progress of urban aesthetization and re-ordering city
life (Welsch 1997). Also, how should that
place be used for watching - which is the point of departure for any public
activities - when nobody looks down from the windows to the square and nobody
responds.
For
reasons hardly recognized it is the occupation of the center of the place by
drug addicts who - subterraneously - signify and embody the essence of
Karlsplatz. Today comes true, in the positive or negative, what the square that
many pedestrians and drivers pass as quickly as possible is labeled: a
„Gegend“, German for para-site landscape
as Otto Wagner called it (see also Serres 1987) or
a „Unort“ (non-site) as I would prefer to say. In any case it does not give the
vedute or the „Stadtbild“ that most of the
„Johnny’s in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
[...]“
Zimmermann 1965
the drug scene
Here
as elsewhere the city picture industry feeds a tourism directed at the
premodernist topics offered by the town and marketed by the City. However
contrary to the sacred views on the city and contrary to the city image
(Stadtbild) suggesting one picture
some people seem to be intruders to the public sphere pictured. Oh yeah? Where?
They appear to be so in the subterranean shop arcade with
the plaza mentioned. Who? „Lawless“
people: drug addicts, aggressive people, peace breakers, business trouble makers,
unemployed.
True
or not, one of the reproaches to these addicts is: they mistake the city for
their Wohnzimmer, living room. They make private non-aesthetic use of the
Stadtbild, city picture, city venue. The word of course does not mean „living room“
making most of us think of family conversations, invitations of relatives or
friends or relaxation with TV. Moreover Wohnzimmer for these people does not
mean relaxation at all because many of them are jobless and endangered by a
homelessness that drives them out of their Wohnzimmers. Meant here are „living
room“ actions necessary for meeting friends who to meet at home would be too
dangerous. Furthermore it means organizing life, acting out problems of exactly
those „family affairs“ that could not be lived in the real „living rooms“
because of a lack of families in the first place.
The
reproach is also questionable because there is a right to some extent for the
use of public space for private reasons, something that already seems to be a
matter of the past for some (Sommer 2005). As
there cannot be indifference on part of actors and spectators most of the
actions are more or less consciously presented to other people. Of course this
happens more or less voluntarily because of a lack of money, appropriate space
and especially because of apt places for dealing drugs. That the use of hard
drugs is tolerated by the execution of law is shown by the fact of social workers’ support with for instance of exchanging of 3000
clean needles for approximately 350
users per day, an action taken because of the dangers
of the drug scene if dispersed (Sommer 2005).
The
subterranean Karlsplatz passage mentioned is a hard-edged space from the hard stone glassy floor up to the low ceiling. It is a
brightly neon-lighted naked space
surrounded by tiny stores with up-front window glass, oil
smells of a hamburger take out and a large Vienna Public
Transit Authority (VPTA) monitoring and public service space behind dark brown
glass. What about the observation
duties by the VPTA? It becomes obvious that the booth additionally to the
monitoring task plays the role of a barely invisible spectator - see section
(media) below. Over the years the addicts „performing“ there must have somehow
felt these „observing eyes“ and responded to them. A first
look at the space described discloses aesthetic similarities to stations. In
fact this is a station with lines, trains, ticket booths, time
plans with some of the corresponding feel including the digit clock that marked
the plaza until it was removed some years ago. Today most of it is part of the
security zone to be addressed later.
The
Karlsplatz passage is the opposite of the overground „Karlsplatz“ materially,
functionally and aesthetically. Yet it represents the Un-ort or para-site in a
reverse and perfect way. Here is the miracle. What is difficult to realize
overground is materialized and created in the underground quite unexpectedly: a
scene.
Being
to some extent essential to squares the
scene here („die Szene“ short for „Drogenszene“, „drug scene“) comprises what
is the stage (ancient Greek skené)
and the people performing at once. Also, the difference to street theater is
that this scene does not go for money, nor uses stage properties or expresses
aesthetic ideas (see below „aesthetics, ltd.“). Besides this stage is not
marked, visibly or invisibly, and so does not approach the passing pedestrians
or keep the natural watching distance between „audience“ and „actors“. This scene within that space as architecturally defined moves and
spreads among the „audience“ and does so of course in front of the large, dark glass of the booth of the VPTA.
What a complex situation in terms of performance!
What does this scene present or represent? What do we
see? Do we see the „timeless“ existences we might admire with looking at Greek
islands’s fishermen after their work in the morning? No. What we see are almost
permanently alert people even when asleep in perfectly transparent phone boots
or public restrooms (now closed). We see them theatrically acting „family“-like
group or friendship affairs obviously not hidden from spectators - people that
have become the target of TV reality show formats or documentaries. We
recognize a kind of participatory theater that sets in motion a second kind of
observation by performers, an inquiry, a kind of finding something out about
somebody/-thing, here about the response of the pedestrians.
What I think are the multiple tasks of a scene sort of overachieving,
doing what is usually divided to the different groups or persons involved in
theater. It could be elucidated by explaining the various senses of the German
term „Besetzung“. There are at least five kinds of theatrical Besetzung, of
theatrically relating to space: the occupation
of space (room, house, country, non-intentional) - the stage incidentally taken
with rigour - , the filling of
room - the apparent use of space provided for all of us - , the cast of a play to be impersonated and
the instrumentation of an
ensemble performing music or of a piece of music to be performed - family,
dealing, and friendship matters in the genres of microcomedies and
microtragedies with suspended catharsis
- , and the cathexis of „neutral“
persons with affection - more or less neutralized, repressed and projected.
With occupation rather than filling is signified not only a military but also
political fighting for „real“ space: How far can liberal societies go with
allowing cases of exception for transgressing the line a priori invisibly drawn
in puplic and legal space for the sake of mutual respect between anonymous
urbans? What are the implications for the „outside“ public that sooner or later
enter the picture? Also, the „cast“ theatrically/musically may fluctuate and
would find it hard to embody what it is aware of to some degree. The thing gets
all the more difficult because the theatrical structure is only rudimentary,
kept in state in nuce, not
developed.
The scene apparently makes use of subterranean Karlsplatz for as long as
certainly nobody would stand it there, at that inhospitable place. The scene
makes appropriate use of Karlsplatz with respect to the aim of a square. It has
become a symbol for Karlsplatz. For the square has been and will further be an
area taken over by cars and, for the rest of the „sqare“ (Resselpark), by
leisure pedestrians living nearby or visiting, by skaters, bikers and children
using the few playing grounds. It is once more surprising that the square is
„occupied“ by the people to a very low degree that live and work at the
numerous institutions directly located at Karlsplatz.
In other words, because of the small dimensions of the square underneath
big overground Karlsplatz those people mark out what should actually be a
bigger space by design. Notwithstanding some deficiencies these people simply
do not have enough of the space needed as compared with the „outer space“
square of the Karlsplatz’s „real“ size: in terms of capacity for subway
passengers, for square crossing pedestrians and for the users of the arcade
stores. Besides, for the architectural part of solving the problem: Why not
give them access to some of the space of for instance the Künstlerhauspassage
in order to use it for own events or meetings? As for the past clashes of all
kinds were, are and will be quite natural. For matters worse police, street
workers and politicians do not attempt to tackle the problem of Karlsplatz
addicts. With increasing aggression and decreasing tolerance specific to
contemporary societies and with helpless, enervated or ignorant people living
and working in the Karlsplatz neighbourhood a different handling of the problem
seems impossible.
In
my opinion, real action appropriate to the square in terms of communication can
only take place on the small square underneath. For it makes visible the big
„square“ problem. The inscription „Karlsplatz U1 U2 U4“ describes what readers
have to expect: a little, hard, ugly surface on which nobody is tolerated
except as being part of the functioning flows of thousands of single passengers
appearing and disappearing day by day.
illustration
from : awadalla 2004
„[...]
im
U4 geign die Goidfisch
der
Bruno legt an Fisch an Land, der Hannes a
[...]“
Falco 1982
under pressure
One building of Karlsplatz is still to be referred to: the
Evangelische (Protestant)
Schule. This primary and secondary school for students of
ages
This
was preceded by an amendment of the Austrian security law of police (Sicherheitspolizeigesetz) in 2004 for the
period beginning with
“Grafische
Darstellung der Schutzzone” („Graphical rendering of the security zone“) posted
at the area, here with standing-point and direction of photograph taken at exit
Karlsplatzpassage/Resselpark in red
This
regulation may be aggravated if you consider other trends of measures taken,
for instance private or public video observation zones as recently imposed at
another area at the border of Vienna’s first district (with commercializing public space like
all stations as recently done by law in Germany). Surveillance technologies installed at open and public places require
today to even acknowledge aspects of privacy needed in the public when this kind of public action is scrutinized.
Also, for the future we need to be afraid of two other trends of measures:
zones observed by video systems and zones without access for some people
regulated by surveillance. For prohibition zones
account to nothing but virtual jail with a „no“ in the widest and multiple
sense because the rest of the area is restricted as well contains borders. Jail
hovers at many places because today’s technology allows that there is
principally nothing that could not be taken away in terms of free space. Mind
the electronic hobble as recently applied to human beings for simpler and less
expensive punishment. Here the inclusion or exclusion of a restricted zone
assimilates human beings to well trained cattle included or excluded by natural
materials and electric or electronic technology.
Also
a „preemptive“ ban on people - expanding the military sense of the word recently
invented by the
With
the security zone amendment comes, since 2004 and especially for places like
Karlplatz, a more severe imposition of the Austrian traffic regulation law (Straßenverkehrsordnung). It allows police
to call on people for walking who do not „move without a cause“. The police is
assigned to tell people to move on, an order given at least three times a day.
People obey but move very slowly and are stimulated to translate motion into
action and expression. More generally spoken they are
forced to perform permanent movement in a non-moving state. Is this the kind of
nomadism commanded by police with a structure different to a former number,
rhythm and speed of movements? It may be that over the last
years the appearance of the addicts may have seemed to have become more
„aggressive“ although no problems in this respect are reported or discussed
recently.
Now,
with increasing pressure on all people concerned directly and officially the
City in early
2004 announced some architectural
and gardening design changes by the City’s construction CEO, the drug
coordination manager (Drogenkoordinator) and the city’s security police CEO.
The changes concerned the improvement of so called „subjective“ and „objective“
securities as directed against drug addicts with promising a „harmonisches
Gesamtbild“, a harmonious total picture (a. 2004a).
What is interesting
to us is that the changes were explicitly put in the context of the project „Art Square Karlsplatz“ („Kunstplatz
Karlsplatz“). Yet only until late 2004 these changes were confirmed and
announced in more detail by the mayor’s secretaries for culture, urban design
and environment (a. 2004b). As if the people using Karlsplatz were not
predominantly passenger pedestrians and without any concept about the relations
between security and aesthetic square design measures this overall project is
referred to an alleged predominance of institutions of arts: Künstlerhaus,
The period of a musealization
of public space as corresponding to mass media museums already started in the 1980ies and now is
over (Mahr 1996). This applies to open public space as well. Instead of legally admitted occupation by
materializing space - a privilege that indeed can only be granted by the
legislator - we have artistic
political actionism by various possible agents like artists or NGOs today,
a fact to which the City and especially
secretary of culture, Kulturstadtrat Andreas Mailath-Pokorny should attempt to
respond to as difficult as it may be.
I will not refrain from making a critical remark. The Kunsthalle Wien, a
public exhibition space for contemporary art that entertains a small pavillion
extention on Karlsplatz ground, has recently plugged into the lawns two dozens
of pillars with yellow plates showing sort of conceptualist instructions
(called „Handlungsanweisungen“) by artists to Resselpark pedestrians like
„Imagine the strangest woman you know“. I say again it is not the business of
today’s cultural politics to even ironically give „instructions for actions“ to
people in public space generally loaded with advertisement so much. Public
space is too precious. Therefore I ask all people involved in „Art Square
Karlsplatz“ to moreover consider how to improve the conditions for art in
public space rather than enabling an art that may be presented in the public as
well as in closed private or museum spaces. Otherwise art becomes stunted and
runs into being mere advertisement, be it as an advertisement for
Kunsthalle Wien or for private advertizers like powerful construction firms to
be seen at another square nearby Karlsplatz.
I claim that an
advanced art of agora/forum entails a delimitation and deseparation
of the concept of art itself. Art in public space - the Austrian label „Kunst
im öffentlichen Raum“ is something else - does it contribute to save public
space itself? Maybe, but only if apart form sculpture and with perspectives to
squares, gardening architecture, landscapes, environments in the widest sense
opening to aesthetizable political and public events like demonstrations that
include today all spatial, plastic and visual arts including literature.
„[...]
Wer
heult denn da? Wer kreischt mit Macht?
Ist
das erlaubt so spät zur Nacht?
[...]“
Wagner 1981
a square - not public, yet homeless
We
have seen that the small square use makes appear the big „square“ problem. From the first this has to do with the square as an interzone. The interzone is the true meaning of the
square today.
I take it that in more recent times squares have been forced to oppose
streets heavily loaded with traffic. This could be shown by an analysis of
historist Ringstrasse gardens including several allusions to the tradition of
squares. The designers of these gardens were commissioned in the attitude of
late nineteenth century to not allow for squares at all. The Ringstrasse itself
was determinated to give way to radiation as a broad way with offering views on
either the representative houses built by the bourgeoisie and court or the
representative procession of the Habsburg empire’s estates and professions on
the occassion of the emperor’s anniversaries to be celebrated. Here a
pre-parliamentary representation was the key issue of public space. This
happened of course at a time when the parliament had been seperated from the
agora/forum and given an own roofed place. Even though Karlsplatz if considered
as part of the Ringstraße does not belong to the tradition of the agora/forum
it is, as seen, one group of users that uses it for their own public agenda:
the poor, the homeless, the punks and - sharing their festures - the addicts.
So, what is the aesthetics of Karlsplatz with respect to its center as occupied
and thereby defined by drug addicts who are poor, homeless punks in some
respect? Nothing but the aesthetics of what there is which is the place as it
looks and sounds and as it is shaped to look and sound by people using it
primarily. What is there?
To start with a detour. It is clear to all of us that a square is a
place without roof. But there is a rooflessness (Dachlosigkeit) which comes
down to a homelessness (Obdachlosigkeit) that in its turn may be a
heimat-lessness (Heimatlosigkeit, individual state of emigration) that escapes
easy categorizing. Of course this characteristics belongs to people, not
spaces. However homeless people carry space with them: things, but also a kind
of being there or here (or here or there) that makes sensible with more than
one sense an almost invisibly defined environment or architecture if you like
as non-permanent, small, participatory, constantly changing, non-locating,
displaced as it may be. Do these people carry a square with them? Do they set
it up?
The square as usually seen and experienced reveals to be the reverse.
Unroofed as it is, it represents what we deliberately occupy for a limited
period of time to show the world what we think, feel and act, as individuals or
as a group and what may be private to an extent and in a way that seems to be
not decent anymore to some of us. Does it make a difference to know that people
show who are or feel themselves deprived of roofs, partially or totally, and
therefore use the space of the square for purported leisure, „private“, non-public
reasons.
Homelessness is part of the phenomenon under scrutiny. It has been
addressed philosophically and aesthetically by an essay in the philosophy of
history published during World War One (Lukács
1994). The history of the novel reveals, so Lukács
contends, that at his (post-Neo-Kantian) times it seems to be
anymore possible to metaphorically give shelter to individuals by a
transcendental philosophy in the form of a narrative. As the preestablished
transcendental structure of a parallelly shaping of subjects and producing of
form worlds is torn (31) the trancendental way of being - being human - has
become set on the path of a lonely wandering through a new world (25). Here
the novel itself, according to Lukács, signifies
a transcendental homelessness (32, „Obdachlosigkeit“). In other words, the form
of transcendental homelessness („Heimatlosigkeit“) in its strongest sense is
embodied by nothing else but the novel admitting a real time of durée to a group of constitutive
principles and allowing for a „return of the subject to itself“ (107) with for
instance „crime and madness [as] objectivations of transcendental homelessness“
(„Heimatlosigkeit“, 52). Lukács did not ascribe to homelessness a rest of the
transcendental split in spatial or urban terms. Along
his theory of the novel he moreover
thought to recognize a merely lonely wandering in the real time
of durée however without political
potential.
Heidegger
on the other hand had the means to aesthetically conceive of a spatial
configuration of homelessness. He could have thought the
„squared“ („Geviert“, Heidegger 2000) as emerging from a squaring on the
grounds of the square or as the open conflict of parties as being grounded in a
secularized artistic conflict of earth and world (Heidegger 1970, 30, 42!,
46-51, 67, 71, 75, 78f.). But non- or even anti-political Heidegger neither in
his philosophy of architecture nor of art discussed the square in the sense of
an open and marked off place. The key topic for an architecture according to
the Geviert is the bridge. And with the notion of „Stadion“ Heidegger invokes
space as an interval only as far as the farm land (Hof) around the peasant’s
house rests on the conception of the familiar, more precisely the family house
(Heidegger 2000, 151-153, 159-161). So the conflict of the opening of the world
with the closing/housing of the revealed within the earth that the Freiburg
philosopher might have politically imagined as a genuine truth of public works
of art (Heidegger 1970, 49-52, 71) remains uncanny as it is caught in a
„conflict of lighting <„Lichtung“> and
concealment <„Verbergung“>“ (56-60, 60).
Finally spacement („Räumen“) addresses the open only with respect to a dwelling
enabled by open space however succeeding with furnishing a home or failing with
the effect of homelessness (Heidegger 1969, 9).
As become evident Lukács and Heidegger more or less did not arrive at
conceptions of homelessness spatially configured and so did not
recognize an aesthetic significance. This is not so remarkable since the square - agorá, forum - has been a marketing, legal,
military and begging space from the outset, hence a matter of polis (not
village). Besides aesthetic concerns of ancient times were restricted to téchne, and the archi-tékton in ancient
So a square may be considered as a limited empty or open surface with
„natural“ borders by houses or artificial borders by design, as the center of a
(part of) town for gathering, as an open space you pass by, walk across it,
stand there for a while and to which your mind is set on for unforeseen or
expected encounters with invisible, experiential structure (a space for
activities specified or not, restricted to be a ground for recreation, if not
sporting, or a court), as a place to temporarily to be occupied by sitting
(without booking or accommodations in general, hence no commodities;
advertisement not banned when restricted to square borders), as a
re/distributing knot for flows of individuals, commodities or
information/regulation for private (market) or public reasons (res publica)
flowing in and out on pathways like streets and sidewalks (the latter were invented
when car/riage traffic dangerously increased by the time), as a place to be
observed by the police beyond the rules for parking lots. (To render what is
meant by the German word „Platz“ I just have used the words square, place,
space, room, ground, court and seat here.) It becomes clear that squares today
are loaded with more than traditional tasks of market, court and politics.
Today traffic may be prohibited and part of public communication transferred to
gardens, press media, broadcasting and the internet. Visible may remain more
than ever the poor, addicts, homeless.
A square is a real medium for communication, potentially and actually.
It is a perceptual medium as much as a transport medium. As perceptual medium
it is not recognized and acknowledged by McLuhan and disciples (see chapters on
roads/streets in McLuhan <1964>, 90-104, Seitter 2002, 125-143; for
Virilio 1986, 72, squares have dissolved in virtual thresholds for
cinematographical lighting). Yet notwithstanding our experience of private
rooms we meet in the public, at squares, first with seeing and hearing others:
steps, movements, clothes, in case signals of greeting and utterings. We greet,
make way if required, slow down, approach people we intended or are surprised
to meet. We start to speak, to one or more persons. We present something and
are allowed to some extent to mark off and even elevate the space on the square
to heighten attention for the message we want to deliver. What we use this way
is public space transforming thereby a person or persons into the public.
Naturally, (temporarily) marked off space may be returned to or derived from
what we know as theaters or coffee houses, roofed places that still are
accessible to the public. This applies of course to stations or traffic stops
in general when additional places (Bahnhöfe, the German word literally „court
for trains“) give space to what was earlier reserved to squares.
Public space developed early on, in modern times, with the invention of
coffee houses and the invention and use of substitutive media like newspapers,
books and mass media (Habermas 1976). Today res publica or public agenda have
become a matter of publicity instead of public space, mediality instead of
communication, images instead of bodies. We cannot dispense with republican
space though. We need public space in which way ever loaded, configured, coded
since public space is coded from the outset.
Open space is understood here as opposed to closed space of houses - be
they public institutions like the parliament or marked spaces like the lawns or
flower beds of a garden or the Spaziergang/walk in the rough sense. A
„spatializing“ walk in Schiller’s understanding is a walk that constitutes
landscape. His proto-romantic „Spaziergang“ has a wanderer taking prison-like
situations for a starting point: metaphorically the private study room at the
beginning of the walk/poem and in „reality“ the walls of the alienating town
that had, in a later section of the poem, burned down with finally arriving
Zarathustra-like in the mountains’ air space (Schiller 2004).
„[...]
I’m on the pavement
Thinking about the government
[...]“
Zimmermann 1965
rather than resistance:
„It
is the transformation of our environment into a completely human interior that
cuts us off from the experience of nature out there. Think of [...] such total
environments as we have them here in the passage from Karlsplatz to the Opera
[...] Nothing here is by itself, everything has its own end, everywhere the
human being meets him/herself only.“ (Böhme 1980, 3). This may not be entirely
true since the passage gives way to the garden part of Karlsplatz. But more
importantly the narcissist aspect of the arcade problematics is touched on
here. For the arcade architecture of earlier 19th century
Paris as Walter Benjamin recognized it
and is still present here works with an „ambiguity of the passage as an
ambiguity of space.“ (Benjamin
1983b, 1050) For instance Benjamin obeserved with the extensive use of waxwork
a mutuality of intentional attitude and mirror-like worlds with the consequence
of ambiguous orientation and space transformed in front of the „nothing“ of
mirror worlds (1050) that allow for an unconscious underworld dreaming (1046).
He further understood the pictorialization of the city as an interior, as an
ambiguous pictorial appearance of a so called dialectics in a standstill
(Benjamin 1983a, 48). However a cultural critique as expressed by Benjamin
seems to be not sufficient today. For this particular kind of utopia (55) does
not give an account of urban space the way it is contested today.
(It may be possible to integrate or even take as a point of departure
for further analysis - with focus on the scene as a veiled strike - one of
Benjamin’s seminal earlier political essays. There have been made several
attempts to interpret „Critique of Violence“ (Benjamin 1971). One of the
essay’s aims was to show that there is a form of violence that entertains a
particular relationship to law which is the strike. Although not necessarily
enforced with bodily power strikes endanger the prevalent order of law. Similar
to negotiation followed by peace the strike succesfully passes the moment when
a new legal order is given or an old one confirmed. Derrida
shed light on Benjamin’s recognition of a crisis of democracy with
distinguishing three kinds: a mythical founding, a sustaining and a devine
destructive violence/power (Gewalten) emphasizing the equality between the
founding and sustaining powers. As the right to non-violent striking is of
founding character as is the general strike violently effectuating a revolution
and abolishing the former law as illegitime the law is basically always in the
making and always past at once; so deconstruction is able to conceive the
equality between the founding and sustaining powers as a sharing and repeating
whereas the police rather confounds the founding and sustaining
powers/violences and thereby capitalizes violence, a figure without figure of
polis (Derrida 1991). The nearest to an aesthetic consideration - Derrida only
touched theater in passing - is Werner Hamacher with his explicitly calling for
a critique of aesthetic reason. As a teleology without aim,
i.e. a pure means, he deals with an art work however without intuition, rather
giving a discourse or self-placing language conformable to displacement.
Accordingly Benjamin’s theory does not take account of action as does Kant’s
second Critique but of omission of action. This necessitates the step from pure
means to the pure violence of the strike as a language in its afformative
mediality. Hamacher coins the term „afformative“ in order to break an
aesthetics of politically moral placements by means of the event of strike.
With realizing displacement the strike does not represent anything, it rather
represents something that amounts to rendering the negative of an aesthetic
event for instance of performance art or show realities (Hamacher 1994). And Giorgio
Agamben took as one of his points of reference what Benjamin’s „Critique of Violence“ remarked about the animal with
respect to the definition of the human being as a zoón politikón, an urban
animal. In another publication he tried to profit from forming a concept of
Ausnahmezustand, state of exception (Agamben 2003, Agamben 2004).)
Today urban space is dissected, multiplied, imposed to a variety of
conflicting interests. Likewise there is not anymore simply one regime of gaze
as for instance was in ancient times the spectacle or play for the masses by a
kind of a few persons’ public life style performed in temples, theaters and
circusses or the reversal of these few seen by the many with a modern times’
panoptism to be endlessly spreaded with ever more refined surveillance
technologies (Foucault 1994, 277f.). So contrary to non-liberating, machinery
like utopia the chance are given by non-locations of power (Foucault 1991). At
stake is a logic of other „spaces that own, amidst a socially defined area, an
entirely different function that even may be completely contradictory to the
functions of the surrounding space“ (Defert 1997, 281, quotes a Foucault
interview of 1982). Instead of the medieval space of locations and the modern
space of extension and expansion defining the „place of a“ person by „not more
than a point in its movement“ (Foucault 1991, 36) we today live in the period
of depots or placements, non-empty irreducable spaces with intrinsic qualities.
Placements relate to other placements with for instance being invisible or
contained in them. These relations called heterotopias by Foucault finally
define for instance traffic spaces like streets, trains, cafés and cinemas. Two
aspects of Foucault’s account bear particular importance. The heterotopia of
crisis with the „nowhere“ today is replaced by heterotopias of deviation
(40f.). And placements or spaces at one location may be incompatible as are
structures like the theater or the cinema allowing different kinds of opposed
spaces or the garden as a totality of the world (42f.).
„[...]
Look out kid
[...]“
Zimmermann 1965
interzones!
Let me therefore pick up what we need to focus on as the other space of
the „interzone“. For on closer observation we are able to recognize two
interrelated zones. It attains the status of an intermediate zone, in short an
interzone. I hasten to add that I do not mean a security zone - quite to the
contrary - and what it spatially implies, namely the spatial rest, what is
outside - in other words - : the „normal“ zone and the „abnormal“ zone, the
zone of the norm or by law or the zone outside it. I rather mean two areas that
are linked in a particular way, more precisely that intersect, interfer,
interlude and interpenetrate and not just border on each other in the spatial
as well as in the sense of communication systems intermeshing. (On squares no
permanent private device or installment of signs usually is permitted. Yet
communication on squares is loaded with semiotic activity. The real comes into
play with the clash between the civilized, which is the consequences of a
dislike to perceive each other. It is a pure question of power. Alone for this
reason we need to guard against zoning in the sense of legal prohibition.)
I believe that urban squares always already have been interzones. For
communicative reasons these areas need to be protected and deserve particular
attention and care. The interzone in question is marked invisibly - by gestures
and not by marks applied, conditions that Lars von Trier shed light on in his movie
„Dogville“ (2003) - by the sheer presence of the homeless addicts and their
movements within the passage’s interior design as materially given and what is
left spatially by the passenger flows. Anybody, any individual or any group
more or less opens up a visibility and audibility of the square offering to the
senses what would not be noticed otherwise.
More precisely, at stake is an area of invisible space right within the
visible intersecting spaces that already appear or are provided. I think of a
kind of space split into two spaces in terms of perceptions. This perception
has an object with identical phenomenal realities but with two different
appearances as is the case with picture puzzles. It does not make sense
speaking that the duck or the rabbit are one as seen into a figure drawn. They
have been one in the first place. But then that entity of a pure presence of
space given in the form of a particular line drawing did either not exist as
something we live with or would never have been possible to ever existing as
not perceived by us (Wittgenstein 1953, 194f.). Is that the point? Are the two outer and the two self perceptions of
the dwelling addicts and the passing pedestrians incompatible exactly because
they are what can be termed as the reverse imperceptible of the other group and
vice versa?
In other words, given that there are two separate visible and invisible
spaces there is an in-between produced by the intersection processed. This kind
of an in-between is like all other kinds permeable. However it is an interzone
not to be touched. Whatever there is materially may not (allowed to) be touched
though it always already is „touched“ phenomenally in terms of two intersecting
spaces. This zone however is realized only by communication enclosing an
interaction with those people who figure as the untouched or as a kind of
(Indian) untouchables. And yet allowed to really touch them in the public are
only „third“ side people, either social workers or the police in strictly
regulated ways.
The work done by people to whom the job is conferred to most probably
causes frustration, even horror or disgust - in front of the dirt,
contamination, loudness and aggression as little as it may be. Here it is too
obvious that the mutuality of perception and perceptual imagination on both
sides is not balanced. However the standard interpretation of the situation
called „reality“ is simpler. There is the passage/arcade, and this passage is
disturbed or is, to put it this way, not „clean“, contaminated, contagious. So
whatever „it“ is that makes the passage dirty et cetera - cleanness being the
suspicious supreme law of aesthetic communication in contemporary passages -
this „it“ is an object that can be enhanced and spread by all sorts of
prejudice possible starting with stamp like ascriptions to people being drug
addicts, criminals of all sorts, sick people, homeless people, people with bad
behaviour, dirty/stinking people, beggars, lyars all in one. In other words,
„normal“ people have a lot of means to project and assemble much of all the bad
imaginable. As always, power decides about the picture. All this is well known.
Although „aesthetic“ perception and „non-aesthetic“ observation - the
latter even more restricted with respect to restriction zones enforcing
obeyment of lines not to be stepped over - are basically distinct and even
contradictory they appear to be combined with monitoring (Cavell 2002) and, as
for our case, with additional help of an appropriate lighting system for the
environment planned as „Kunstplatz Karlsplatz“.
My solution for the beginning: „We“ people need to perceive the addicts,
install a common space or set up the conditions for that space as well as
„they“ would need to learn to perceive us to some extent. So the „third“ side
people should provide an aesthetic education - the set up of its structure and
the courses to be given we aestheticians will be happy to provide - , not just
in order to restore our feeling secure and being accepted as the headless
people quickly passing by we most of the times are. A mutual perception
requires an inclusion of sensation/sentiment on both sides in order to achieve
a restitution, even expansion of „space“ mutually. This should enable all of us
to move beyond the perspective of pictures not just registered by surveillance
cameras like the one directed from the top of the Evangelische Schule. Mutual
perception is necessary in order to protect public space - agorá/forum - for a conversation as competitive as it may be
(Habermas 1976, 13f.).
As I said, both of the two spaces circumscribed have an outside. I mean
that addicts and „normal“ people both refer to, depose of or intervene to what
they believe does not belong to their own area, to what are the others. Because
for addicts privacy falsily exists to a certain extent and in a somehow
diminished way taking outer space as a feeble entity or diffused agglomeration
of surrounding stimuli. Likewise „normal“ passenger-pedestrians reduce somehow
group-like structured crowds of addicts to a mere acoustic and visual
phenomenon falsily assumed to be active and intentional aggressors. Obviously
these outer spaces are composed by imagination and perception on both sides.
They are primarily intended not to be part of their visual fields in either
way. As I said before, they are attributed to the outer space.
Now, metaphysically the interzone or medium has early been recognized as
the metaxy (Aristotle 1831, Mahr
2002, Mahr 2004). The metaxy obeys
an intrinsic difference according to the through. The through does not only
impose a direction to an undirected area. It also entails an indication of two
beings containing the between as between. The between is the connection and
relationship of these two entities. Yet for us a through reveals us as the
first being at which another being is directed or which being is directed at
the other one. That relation shows to be one of possibility and reality and
need not be described in spatial and procedural terms and as efficient in terms
of modern physics. Additionally we can take this relation as a bilateral,
symmetrical one, theoretically as well as practically with realizations. The
medium is structured bidirectional, "functions" in both directions.
If „we“ are not just perceptual systems - machines, animals - we are beings of
a kind to develop the perceived, transform it to a phantasma and move on to
reflection. I further assume a mutual perception of two subjects with so
realizing a symmetry that is structural to subjectivity. This brings us to the
question concerning mutual perception as - for human beings - acknowledgement
(Hegel 1970). That this relationship is unstable is shown by struggles for
acknowledgement and the dialectics of desire including motoric and semiotic
actions. Yet even without symmetry and mutuality we should be able to conceive
of human beings perceiving each other. This is the point at which communication
superimposes perception. Media of perception need to emerge as media of
communication. In any case the interzone as derived from the metaxy metaphysically - as aesthetic as
it may be (Mahr 2004) - remains rooted in touch and its sense, in a discourse
about the animal which is zoology. As is shown the sense of touch is the only
sense indispensable for the existence of living beings (Aristotle 1831). Hence
the taboos and the ground for a primordial „untouchability“ with touching as
the sense of the senses and as a question for life and death. Besides, the
sense of touch has not a distinctive, own sensible quality at hand, so to say,
but several ones and potentially all qualities in one (Derrida 2000, 61f.,
compare de Kerckhove 1993).
„[...]
You don’t need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows
[...]“
Zimmermann 1965
It is Jean-Luc Nancy who reminds us that the city as a public area is a
space (
Excluded hereby are
people signifying the community as do the Karlsplatz addicts who, by means of
the interzone, together with pedestrians have the chance of „comparution“.
More precisely, here as elsewhere common appearance is the space of public appearance, however an appearing-together that cannot be
distinguished from a private appearing anymore. For the appearing-together is
not anymore urban, civil and even political in the administrative sense
(Nancy/Schober 2004, 132) - politics traditionally being the administration of
civil society and the being-common (136) - because the urban has been intruded
by commerce, leisure, tourism, design, cinemas, museums, various communication
media and by sexuality and infection. The space of public appearance as a multiplied
and potentialized space has become deformable and destructible, labyrinthic and
megalopolitical (Nancy/Schober 2004, 132).
So the real intruders of the urban appear to be commerce, design and the
media as visible or invisible as they may be. This converts the „intruder“
addicts to reserves of a conflict to be staged about the destructibility of a
public appearance space intruded by the private activities on a large scale
mentioned.
Yet the ground of a common appearing is actually excluded as a fundament of
being-in-the-community not just because of the disappearing of the distinction
of public and private appearance. Additionally very often such a common
appearing is made impossible with denying a figure or name to people. Such an
exclusion, as
Exclusion is
exactly what happens to the Karlsplatz scene with „Karlsplatz scene“ being the
name for „the“ problem instead of the problems that have drug addicts or
homeless people or criminals or jobless people we have with them together if
not in common.
Because of the
destructive effects showing already with emerging the communities
must not to be misunderstood as products, as operations, works composed of
components - the common escapes, is inoperative and irrepresentable (Nancy/Kate
2002). Post-totalitarian politics is only possible by acknowledging that irregular moment of
a specific kind of opening. Communities may only become aware of themselves by
being disturbed by intruders and at the same time being ready for this as
irrepresentational it may be (
This is exactly what the Karlsplatz scene embodies and demonstrates, an
empty center.
The reason for these desasters, says Nancy, is the modern kind of
being-in-common or between-/among-us or „cum“ that entails no given community,
a community constantly and necessarily de-/constructing itself. Therefore the
being-in-common needs to be conceived as an interval, an inter/cum. Here
something different or „new has installed itself between“ like between the
notes of music - interval - which is nothing but a gestalt not disposed of the ephemeral. With paying tribute to
the two most famous buildings located at Karlsplatz - New Year’s Concert’s
Musikverein and first White Cube exihibition space Wiener Secession - a
reminder is due to late 19th century when, against the background of a
physicalist, associationist psychological philosophy gestalt qualities were
discovered at what is known since Pythagoras as the (musical) interval (Mach
1991, Ehrenfels 1890; see also Mahr 1988). For
Here is the hardest thing to think. That empty center as de-signed by
the Karlsplatz scene is to be imagined and realized as an inoperative interval.
That can mean nothing else than a figuration of something different or new: of
the nothing of a place as an ephemeral gestalt.
What is this scene if not designed legally, politically, socially,
aesthetically and yet to create something beyond the elementary particles that
move in different groups, speeds, consistencies? Because of a significant lack
of common being the relation of being-with with politics should not be a founding
or expressing relation which would run again into a founding or expressing of a
totality of being-with. How can politics guarantee justice within a multitude
and multiplicity (Nancy 2002, 40) and leave expression to the
space of the interval, the interzone? This questions remains to be answered.
„[...]
Hang around the theater
[...]“
Zimmermann 1965
(media)
There is a task whose outlines may have been felt with the remarks
concerning the lack of McLuhan’s general theory of the media and
What, among other things, determines life in cities today is a
phenomenalization of the body in the public by means of
extended pictorial activities. For instance could be made a case of the
commodification of public space with billboard campaigns for nylons that interweave media as bodies and bodies as media (Lammer 2004,
183f.). This appears to be specified as the pores of the city’s body (194),
pores that are materialized and pictorialized at once by means of a complex
procedure of urban imagination that confirms the town as woman (195f.) for
instance with virtual porose film membranes (200). In fact this analysis is
further sustained by the new technology of semi-transparent billboards covering
whole houses or trams with billboards that allow the transmission of light to
people sitting in these houses or trams. It is not unlike the semi-transparent
mirrors or those „sculpture“ actors on public squares covered with porose
although metallicly shining „nylon“ on the other.
Also to be found on a level more or less pictorial are other phenomena
of transparency. The fact of the construction of noise protection walls along
highways and railways (a chance of medialisation, but of what kind?) seems to correspond to a kind of necessitated „picturing“ accompanying
transportation. A consequence may be that we act in real space as if it were
just a picture we pass through. Mistaking real people for pictures - nourished
by VR like computer games - may therefore be understood as resulting from an
increase of ghost-drivers or of people recently canceling the consensus of going
on the right side on sidewalks and being ready to bumbing against each other (compare discussion
of trust on using streets by car: O’Neill 2005).
Resistant „materials“ are obstacles to be removed. This „passing through“ has
been realized in art by Jeffrey Shaw’s „Legible City“ (1989), a video
installation of a home trainer you sit on and use for virtually (on the screen
you look at) driving through a Manhattan rebuilt with huge letters and enabling
you to read and see your own city by the houses you can pass by and - if not
„careful“ - even drive through (as a counter work to „Legible City“ may be read
Luc Courchesne’s “Paysage no. 1/Landscape One” of 1997 where spectators may become
themselves virtual visitors of Montreal’s Mont Royal Parc, have a walk with
individually selected route and speak with several persons or person groups pre-filmed
as for instance a young couple or a family.). Today this technology is used by
computer games offering figures you can literally go through what is still abhorred by
some gamers.
Another urban media phenomenon are computer games, especially
multi-player games that helps to develop the players’ spatial capabilities on
screen like „Asheron’s Call“ and „The Sims“ with increasingly involving players
in (space) design processes that encourage sociability and thereby succesfully
profit from urban planning knowledge (Jenkins/Squire 2002).
In which way ever it will be aesthetic, one thing is for sure. Squares,
as do streets, will be or already have become objects of visual design with the
use of video and web cams. The camera on top of the Evangelische Schule is one
among many proofs. Electronic observation systems - to be considered as
virtually restricting and changing part of a space into zones - may be hidden
but are just another example of aesthetic design which remains to be examined
by a scientific analysis of its aesthetic aspects.
Under way is the imposition of a different kind of surveillance system.
Again, aesthetic design is given and may be playfully possible with the
introduction of surveillance by electronic hobbles which in
Don’t forget television. For TV has constantly appropriated private
space and made it public in sensationalist reports or reality shows that offer
sadist pleasures by watching people suffering. It seems as if people who show
them suffering in material or symbolic ways publicly - as do drug addicts - are
not conceded any public space beyond electronic mass media. In other words,
addicts who more or less involuntarily show in the public have become (or
been?) competitors with the media and especially with TV. Surveillance at a
time when discussed in the wake of dawning control societies was already
analysed by a powerful work on
A problem has arisen - for social workers, for the police - with recent
mobile phone communication. What is difficult to survey, what seems to be
chaotic may become a tool for again aesthetically organizing and also
consciously showing yourself. People loudly using mobile phones could profit
from what has become an actual political means. Also consider what has become a
kind of instant nomads called smart/flash mobs, a phenomenon that has already
been converted to performance art by Hamburg radio art group Ligna with “Radioballett”
when in Hamburg (2002) and other cities a few hundreds of people were ordered
via small transistor radios to cover the public space of stations with allowed
or not allowed actions like begging (see
http://www.ok-centrum.at/ausstellungen/open_house/ligna.html). At stake, artistically or not, is a reorganization of public space that
may once again put to the test of what a square achieves today in terms of
conceiving a continuum beyond shopping arcades and prohibition borders.
All these phenomena are focused to some extent in the problematics of squares
today. As such these phenomena give rise to another question. Do addicts
respond to these various kinds of media aesthetically? To which extent do they
medialize themselves? Do they stage themselves as a counter medium?
„[...]
Watch the parkin’ meters
[...]“
Zimmermann 1965
aesthetics, ltd.
Aesthetics is the future of ethics, to reverse a saying by Lenin for
approaching the conclusion. We might win almost everything with enhancing and
spreading aisthesis.
So what does and did aesthetics have to say, the philosophy of art? Have
there been made contributions for a philosophy of aesthetic space? Not until
Kant. A theory and classification of the arts before Kant was concerned with
the classifying criteria of use or pleasure, invention or imitation, and design
or beauty. With Kant the modern basis of aisthesis as considered by a theory of
a specific kind of sensation/sentiment/perception - clear and confused
cognition as Baumgarten had put it - seemed to be an object necessary for
clarification. For some reasons Kant felt drawn to detach a basis of sensation.
There needed to be something before sensation because sensation and what is
given by it seemed to be determined by a variety of different contents constantly
changing in our minds. Kant called it the form of all variety. This form is not
yet an active form as produced and set free by the formation of mental activity
but an entity that transcends or escapes our mental attention in general. The
forms of intuition as prepared by sensation: space, time. As with space, Kant
took away what could have been the basis of an aesthetic theory in space and
time, but thereby achieved to open up space as a fundamental form a priori.
Space is needed for mathematics, physics and other Newtonian mechanist
sciences, for geometry and science proper. Required are objects in one space (Kant <1930>, A22) which is a necessary representation a priori (A24), a pure
intuition (A25) a priori (B40, B73), an intuition of the outer senses (A378),
however not empirical (A23), an infinitely given quantity (B39), a condition of
experience (A49).
However Kant did not found his theory of art on space and time. He
rather explicitly removed concerns of a theory of art and the aesthetic from
what he called the aesthetic of time and space. As we know, Kant addressed the
(beautiful) arts only late in the development of his three-partite system of
Critique. Instead of sensation he chose to focus on aesthetic endeavours in the
modern sense with filling a gap left between the first two critiques. He sort
of discovered the complex mental activity of judgment. Hume had aroused his
attention on the topic who showed that there is (aesthetic) judgment based on
principles and standards however not to be defined as with natural or moral
laws. Judgment instead of sensation further lead Kant to (aesthetic) art in so
far as art is one of the most suitable objects for the refinement of judgment as a work - first for the artist,
secondly for the critic.
But when Kant in his Third Critique more incidentally begins to speak
about art (as distinguished from nature, science and manufacture) he very soon
pondered the arts as an objectivity appropriate to the freedom of artists who
liberate themselves from merely imitating nature. Accordingly the capability
called the artist’s ingenium is seen
by Kant as a mental activity not dealing with indifferent space (and time) to
be shaped but requiring a coordination with objects of ideas. Hence artistic ingenium particularly requires, besides
imagination, taste and reason and a spirit which guarantees an ability to
express aesthetic ideas which is what art does.
Proto-idealist
himself Kant gave his account of the arts as an expression of (aesthetic) ideas by means of words (speaking
arts poetry and rethorics), gestures (plastic arts including painting and
plastics in the more narrow sense comprising sculpture and architecture, the
latter with restriction of aesthetic ideas because of the use of its objects)
and sound (music as art of the beautiful or merely pleasant play of
sensations/sentiments, also and likewise an art of pure colour).
Since the time of
Kant idealist-expressivist theories of art made their way. Schelling wrote
about symbols of the Absolute as configured in the artworld’s real series of
the plastic arts (musics, paiting, and the plastic arts in the more narrow
sense) and ideal series of speaking art (poetry). Hegel only slightly changed
the classification principle when counting as arts of the sensitive/sensual/sensible
(active) semblance of the idea architecture, sculpture and the romantic arts
painting, music and poetry.
The classificatory
matter shows to be even more complicate with Heidegger who concedes that the
conception of art as essentially being poetry - art as a work-ing that unveils
being - should not reduce the arts of building, pictures and sounds. However
poetry is but a way of an enlightening design of truth. For language, before assuming shape as poetry, is beyond communication
when putting things into the „open“ whereas the stone, the plant and the animal
are destined to remain in the closed. It is hard to understand, even more so to
track any criteria for classification within the claim that constructing and
forming only occur within an „open“ of language solely which is not specific to
any of the arts or, more narrowly spoken, to the aesthetic of space, for
instance of the square. Has this lack of specificity something to do with a „fringing“
(Verfransung) of the arts in our times (Adorno 1967).
Goodman who might
have been confirmed by Heidegger’s emphasis on language from the first cannot
contribute to a concept of the arts of time and of space respectively. His
semiotic ontology rather gives an account of a special kind of signs, i.e. of representations of art works as
denotations under the autographic regime with singular multiplicatory, physical
objekts (monoprint, cast) or with singular simple, physical objects and ideal entities (painting,
sculpture) or with the object-event/act (performance art, acting, musical
improvisation) or the allographic regime with ideal and reducable objects, the
infinitely multipliable physical manifestations of ideal types of literature,
notes or the architectural plan (books, performances of composition,
buildings). It is obvious that a square has a name and is also spatially
design(at)ed by surrounding buildings, mutually gaze-crossing window, walls and
the rules for a specific use. Yet the multiple semiotic structure of a square
seems to be too secluded to retain the powerful dimension of space.
Up to this day we see aesthetics as general theory of art only
insufficiently equipped with addressing problems of space. Yet architectural
and urban design offer an appealing albeit difficult aesthetic potential that
affects the arts in a rather different way. Debated, fought for and used as the
way of perceiving and letting perceive changes aesthetics with far reaching
consequences here.
Here is the chance to turn to
The basic task of art still is to enable paths/trajectories by way of
touching, of exposing eye and ear, a part of the self. Miraculously the
sensible sense divides itself into the five (or more) senses and thereby
fragments the sense. If art - a touch by being (
What is the lesson taught by the drug addicts to aesthetics? An art of
aisthesis that leads us back, among other aims, to the arts themselves?
Whatever the conception of this art will look like - reordering
architecture, theater, language and urban design in the space of a
classification of the arts - it will become clear that aesthetic perception
rather than legal and urban design will be the solution. The
chance of para-site Karlsplatz is a constantly thematizing of an art of the
public space that starts with the Wohnzimmer realized by
those who legitimately use public space for private reasons. Karlsplatz square needs to be revealed as a scene in the theatralic
sense. It is the small square use underneath that makes appear
the big square problem. Therefore we all concerned have come
under pressure. It is obvious that one-sided populist legal, police and
social measures aggravate the problem. For all these reasons a security
zone is the wrong solution as is „Kunstplatz Karlsplatz“ which
neither is appropriate nor sufficient. It rather would be a backdrop to
aesthetic art objects where communication, especially aesthetic communication
is needed. In search for other spaces an examination of aesthetic
perception is required for the recognition of an interzone as given with
Karlsplatz. This perception necessarily is a mutual
perception appropriate to the interzone between the drug
addicts and the pedestrians. As Nancy puts it a being-in-the-community
is possible here, a comparution, a kind of common
just-being-published, that is an appearing-together that again
makes clear that an intruding cannot be evaded. We need to be exposed to
the „inter“ of the inoperative interval as the interzone to be perveived.
Art as fragmentary will be helpful in the
future, that is not as a traditionally spatializing and reifying means but with
the aim of a mutual appearing-with-perceiving and the creation of
paths/trajectories that enable an aisthesis really touching and thereby
enabling aesthetic communication.
Bibliography
(translations of quotes from listed sources below with no translators named:
Peter Mahr)
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