Miško Šuvakoviæ - Neo-aesthetic theory: complexity and complicity must be defended

This book is dedicated with love to my mother, Ljuba uvakovi

Editor: Tatjana Markovic

Translation: arko Cveji, Irena entevska,

Branka Nikoli, Goran Kapetanovi,

Dragana Starevi, Sonja Bai

English copy-editing: Chris Prickett

Layout and cover: Nikola Stevanovic

Printed and bound in the EU

Miko uvakovi: Neo-Aesthetic Theory. Complexity and Complicity Must Be Defended .

Vienna: HOLITZER Verlag, 2017

Cover image: Provisional Salta Ensemble, Corridor - Hotel Regina, Vienna, April 5, 2013

Courtesy Provisional Salta Ensemble

HOLITZER Verlag, Wien 2017

Hollitzer Verlag

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Hollitzer Baustoffwerke Graz GmbH, Wien

www.hollitzer.at

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ISBN 978-3-99012-372-0 ePub

1
THEORIES OF MODERNISM
Politics of Time and Space

2
THE RETURN OF THE POLITICAL
in Contemporary Aesthetics, Philosophy and Art

3
TROUBLES WITH THE ECONOMY, GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY
The Social Turn

4
GRAY ZONES POLITICAL ECONOMY THROUGH FORMS OF LIFE
Eleven Theses on Feuerbach, Friedman, Hayek and Speculative Realism

5
THE AESTHETICS OF DISRUPTION
Platforms of Avant-Garde Production in Socialist Yugoslavia and Serbia

6
CONCEPTUAL ART
The Yugoslav Case

7
BEYOND BORDERS
John Cage, Cold War Politics and Artistic Experimentation in the Socialist Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia

8
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE SCREEN (AND / OR / AS) EVENT
Musical De-Ontologisation

9
AESTHETICS, POLITICS AND MUSIC
The Context of Contemporary Critical Theory

10
MUSIC AND POLITICS
The Reconstruction of Aesthetics and the Contemporary World

11
GENERAL THEORY OF IDEOLOGY
Architecture

12
ARCHITECTURE AS CULTURAL PRACTICE
The Markets Appropriation of the Social or the Ideology of the Multitude

13
TECHNOLOGIES OF PERFORMANCE IN PERFORMANCE ART
Concepts and Phenomenological Research

14
THE AVANT-GARDE: PERFORMANCE AND DANCE
Ideologies, Events, Discourses

15
DISCOURSES AND DANCE
An Introduction to the Analysis of the Resistance of Philosophy and Theory towards Dance

16
THEORETICAL PERFORMANCE
Performative Knowledge

17
APPROPRIATIONS OF MUSIC
Postmedia: Music

18
BEYOND PAPER
Postmedia and Flexible Art

19
BIO ART
The Prehuman / The Human / The Posthuman

20
SIMULTANEOUSLY ALWAYS, NOW AND EVERYWHERE
A Real Fiction

21
MULTIPLE POLITICAL/SEXUAL BODIES
Between the Public and the Intimate

22
AUTO-CRITICISM OF SUBJECTIVISATION
Painting as Postmedia Politics

23
A CLAUSTROPHOBIC EVENT
Bare Life

24
A NARRATIVE
An Utterly Ordinary Evening PETIT a

01 Provisional Salta Ensemble: State of Exception 1 , photo-essay, photomontage, 2011
Courtesy Provisional Salta Ensemble

Neo-Aesthetic Theory is oriented toward research and interpretation of THE unmissed encounters between Philosophical Theories and Contemporary Arts.

This book can be read from different positions of understanding, experiences, living, events and interpretations of contemporarity, but there is one characteristic and visible platform from which it is written: this is the platform of a permanent state of emergency. The writer of these lines could say, similarly to those who have strongly experienced the differences and conflicts of the 20th and early 21st century: my life unwound and is unwinding between the public and private the depicted and the undepicted in a permanent state of emergency: communist revolutions, self-governed freedoms from bureaucratic communism, crises of real-socialism, transitional primary accumulations of capital, nationalistic hysterically-paranoid proscription and the establishment of global neo-liberalism and a global crisis. This is something which cannot be overcome even with good intentions or a cheery disposition. It is something which is always played out with consequences. This is why there is a recurrence, in the lines of the letter which follows, with the only weapons which modern man has been able to build-up in his resistance to a permanent state of emergency , and this is a minimum of rationality, a critical approach and radical analysis. The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live in is the norm. We have to reach a concept of history which suits this (Walter Benjamin).

It is the construct that emerges from the encounter between object and subject, between an effect and an affect, or affect and concept or meaning: But whats the real or more precise linkage among these texts or topics? the constitution of a territory (is it literature, the legible, an unordered catalogue of images of life?) (JeanLouis Schefer).

I would like to get out of the bottle just like that fly which was taught this by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Research , but I am afraid that by coming out of my bottle I will find myself in some other bigger or smaller bottle which will once again be mine and for me, for us and for the lives of others. If I am always caught in a space and time of supervision, control and regulation the burnt ships behind me from adolescent pirate stories remain just a spectre of childish fictions and commercial prose then, carrying out a minimum of rationality, a critical approach and radical analysis remain the means which keeps a precarious hope in place of the broken class-based and ethnic utopias about Gods graciousness, the Heavenly Kingdom, the island of humanity, brotherhood, equality and freedom, about socialism, about communism, about individual freedoms and liberalism.

But, towards what are a minimum of rationality, a critical approach and radical analysis oriented? Definitely towards that which is caught meta-physically and existentially between the undepicted, mute life and the depicted, enunciated life. What is that which is in a trap? That which will maybe be recognised, i.e. named as life. In other words, there will be word of a state of emergency in which life is played out in all the evasions and approaches within the events of contemporarity.

This is a desire for an unfulfilled, real and direct democracy.

It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is
self-evident anymore , not its inner
life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.