Unromantic and Uncritical: Working with Illiberal Arts

Kerstin Stakemeier is Professor for Art Theory and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg. She teaches and writes, often in collaboration, a.o. Illiberal Arts ( 2021 exhibition/publication/program with Anselm Franke at House of World Cultures Berlin), Universal Receptivity (2021 seminar/publication with Bill Dietz), Class Languages (since 2017, shows/magazine with Manuela Ammer, Eva Birkenstock, Jenny Nachtigall, Stefanie Weber), Reproducing Autonomy (2016 book with Marina Vishmidt), Power of Material / Politics of Materiality, Fragile Identities, The Present oft he Future (2014-2018, lecture series/books with Susanne Witzgall).

Abstract

“Throughout the last four years Anselm Franke and I have been working towards an exhibition and publication project entitled “Illiberal Arts”, which opened in Berlin at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in the beginning of September. After initially imagining a show dedicated to questions of alienation, we quickly came to realize that this trope implied a sort of mourning we weren’t prepared to take on: the malady of the liberal subject, the price it had to pay for the national and juridical privilege of its modern freedom. After inviting 24 artists, six poets and nine discussants to participate we learned through their work that, even though we had invited them on the basis of their structural affirmation of the present as an illiberal undeadening of liberalism’s forms, there were indeed themes connecting their practices. One of them was a mistrust of figures imported from Romanticism, from that period of culture’s nationalization in Northern Europe that also enabled the rise of critique as a form, and of art as its (autonomous) subject. In the talk I will start from this mistrust of Romanticism to propose a mistrust of critique and of art as the starting point of a present, a perceptive “life-work” (Lu Märten) within today’s arts.”

Stakemeier’s presentation is part of an ongoing discussion, ”Communities to Come: The Subject of Art Criticism’s Universalism,” run by Mikkel Bolt, James Day, Frida Sandström and Fredrik Svensk. Can the universalist pretensions of aesthetic judgment be derailed in such a manner that it becomes possible to envision a universality not based on an initial political break between the subject of judgment and those it excludes (geopolitically or otherwise)? And what, then, would such universalism imply? We wish to examine the paradox that the critical subject seems essential for both critical discussion and also the abolition of the very performance of this form of subjectivity. What would it mean, instead of realizing the promise of the art critical subject, to abandon it? Is something like an abolition of art criticism possible, and what would it look like?