Artistic Practices of the Twentieth and the Tweny-First Centuries and the Political

In the philosophical and critical discussions of artistic practices an enormous change has occurred in the last two decades, for with the demise of the major theoretical narratives of the 20th century not only the previous status of art and of its practices but also their relation to politics and the political became questionable, for the character and the meaning of the latter two have also been modified. The aesthetic project of critique and utopianism, on which art since romanticism was erected, became (and remains) radically questionable.
The aim of the research project is thus to research, on the basis of the mentioned views, the contemporary relation between artistic practices and the political. In this endeavor special attention will be given to the following notions and their conceptualizations: artistic practices, aesthetic practices, art as an event, politics, the political, hegemony, political event, the partition of the sensible, and the possibility and impossibility of a community. As a connecting element between the modern and the postmodern epochs, the concepts of truth and its status (especially in Badiou, Rancière, Adorno, and Heidegger) will be employed.
Within the framework of the research of the links between philosophy and art, we will also research regimes of visibility, the image, fiction, and the illusion, all in relation to the problem of the sensible and sensation as pleasure, the affect, and the brutal. In this conjunction of the visible and the sensible it is possible to show the social and political consequences of art.
A further aim of the research project will be: (a) to analyze and conceptualize, from a comparative, historical, and critical-philosophical aspect, various practical forms of the interrelationships between artistic practices and the political, as well as various interpretations of this relation; in this way we will attempt to achieve a critical analysis of the contemporary situation and tentatively point to possible trends; (b) to articulate conceptually different paths and modi in which philosophy and art are immanently political; to rethink the levers of influence on social and symbolic mechanisms which determine us; to propose a concept of immanence that will be compatible with such positions.
 

Basic research project "Artistic Practices of the Twentieth and the Tweny-First Centuries and the Political" is founded by Slovenian Research Agency.