Open lecture. Dr Pioter Shmugliakov "The Artwork’s Community"

24th April, 12.00
102
aud. (Malūnų str. 3, VAA building C1)

The lecture is concerned with a systematic, ontological explication of the political dimension of art, conceptualized as “the artwork’s community,” and claimed as a constitutive parameter of what we take art to be. As Jacques Rancière has famously argued, for us, moderns, “certain 'politics' is consubstantial with the very definition of the specificity of art” – which is to say, any plausible explanation as to why art matters necessarily involves for us a particular notion of emancipated being-together. The lecture surveys different versions of this notion, starting from the distinction between two primary routs of such explanation: the Kantian and the Heideggerian, aesthetic and aletheic. In the Kantian idiom, the artwork’s community is a dimension of humanity as a whole, transcendentally claimed by the work as the possibility of non-alienated communal existence. For Heidegger, the artwork’s community is a realization of this possibility in an actual political entity, inaugurated in the world-opening event of historical truth. The great bulk of the lecture considers the complex interplay of these paradigms of artwork’s community in two seemingly incommensurable artistic phenomena of our present: relational art and psychedelic trance.

Dr. Pioter Shmugliakov – postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of Freie Universität Berlin and a poet working in Russian and Hebrew. He was teaching courses in aesthetics and philosophy of art in Tel Aviv University, Sapir College, and Oranim College, and was a guest lecturer in the leading art schools in Israel: Hamidrasha Art School at Beit Berl College, Haifa University, and Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. He is author of two books of poetry, I’ve Cheated the Polygraph (2010: Tel Aviv – in Hebrew), ЬЯТЪЫ (Москва: Арго-риск, 2011). As a poet he experiments with visual and audio poetry and was active as a performance artist. His latest multimedia poetic project Метаглория (2016) was presented in several cities (Jerusalem, Moscow, San Petersburg). Pioter Shmugliakov was resident author and the curator of the art section in journal Plexus published in Jerusalem and has contributed articles to many exhibition catalogs, including the 55th Venice Biennial Israeli pavilion catalog. His current research is concerned with philosophical clarification of the fundamental concepts of art, their critical application in the variety of artistic phenomena (ranging from psytrance music to arthouse film), and with philosophy of love.