Kerstin Stakemeier

Entkunstung is a term coined by philosopher Theodor W. Adorno to describe the disintegrating influences of mass culture on the production and reception of modern art. It characterises what he understands as the fate of art in the 20th century, the dissolution of boundaries between its media as well as between art and other cultural productions. In my thesis I discuss this process not as a fate but rather as an enabling principle of artistic production since the beginning of the 20th century. I delineate a history of Entkunstung, a history of artists who attempted to desert the field of art in reconstructing its means and materials in accordance with the popular culture of their time and its schemes of production. Starting from the productivist artistic approaches of the Russian Revolution and their understanding of art’s possible dissolution into a general characteristic of a revolutionized form of industrial labour, I proceed to discuss the practices of a group of architects, artis...

Contributors: Alexander García Düttmann, Michael Hirsch, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Burkhardt Lindner, Eckardt Lindner, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Marcus Quent, Marianne Seidler, Kerstin Stakemeier, Marcus Steinweg, Christoph Türcke, Jan Völker. Die 1970 posthum herausgegebene »Ästhetische Theorie« ist ein Fragment gebliebenes Textgefüge. Ihr Autor, Theodor W. Adorno, entfaltet darin wesentliche Gedanken in einer Verflechtung von Kunst, Philosophie und Gesellschaft. // Im philosophischen Denken – das hier ästhetische Theorie wird – soll durch die Frage der Kunst der Anspruch auf eine andere gesellschaftliche Praxis erscheinen. Es ist diese besondere Konstellation, die einen Abstand zu gegenwärtigen Diskursen des Ästhetischen und Politischen markiert und Adornos »Ästhetische Theorie« aktueller denn je macht. 271 S., € 29,- Broschur mit Fadenheftung ISBN 978-3-85132-741-0 [vergriffen]

I, Kerstin Stakemeier, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 4 Entkunstung is a term coined by philosopher Theodor W. Adorno to describe the disintegrating influences of mass culture on the production and reception of modern art. It characterises what he understands as the fate of art in the 20th century, the dissolution of boundaries between its media as well as between art and other cultural productions. In my thesis I discuss this process not as a fate but rather as an enabling principle of artistic production since the beginning of the 20th century. I delineate a history of Entkunstung, a history of artists who attempted to desert the field of art in reconstructing its means and materials in accordance with the popular culture of their time and its schemes of production. Starting from the productivist artistic approaches of the Russian Revolution and th...

“Art Work as Life Work: Lu Märten's Feminist ‘Objectivity’” highlights the feminist stakes of German feminist-materialist art historian Lu Märten's interventions in the interwar discourses on art and labor, on objectivity (Sachlichkeit), and the new media of film and radio. The essay argues that Märten's contributions to these areas sit squarely within more familiar narratives of materialist aesthetics and Weimar culture (from Walter Benjamin's epochal Artwork Essay to the Bauhaus) and that they do so on account of her heterodox reading of Marx and commitment to Spinoza's monism. In Märten's view, this non-binary materialism offered an alternative, non-Hegelian route to a materialist conception of art or as she preferred to say, form. In contrast to art history's academic formalism, Märten espouses a notion of form that does not maintain art's autonomy but instead connects art to other social fields. Here form always evolves out of informality. The essay traces the close bond between art work and life work across Märten's multiple publications, including her theoretical magnum opus Essence and Transformation of Forms/Arts and her studies on The Economic Conditions of Artists and The Female Artist. In so doing, the text contributes to revisiting the firm boundaries that art history has drawn between objects and communities.

The article focuses on artist Jutta Koether and exhibition of her works at the Museum Brandhorst, Munich in Germany. Topics discussed include analysis of her paintings as the gendered and arthistorical afterlife of mannerism, her novella "F." published in German in 1987, and her views on how female artists have defied the status quo.

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today.

This article presents an introduction to four texts that the German feminist-materialist art historian Lu Märten (1879–1970) published between 1903 and 1928. It outlines some of the major concepts of and contexts for this unduly neglected thinker. Her writings covered a wide terrain that spanned studies on the labor conditions of female artists, polemics against “proletarian art,” and a monist, rather than dialectical, view on film, art, and what she called the “full life-work of a human.” At the core of her multiple endeavors was the demand for remaking the history of art as a history of form that is more capacious than art's institutionalized Western field. Situating Märten's work in historical debates (e.g., on Marxist aesthetics in the 1930s), the introduction also points to the new legibility that her nonaligned materialism gains with the material turn in the humanities.

To support our argument by comparison with the revolutionary State, which ought to be a State that is a ‘non-State’ – that is, a State tending to its own dissolution, to be replaced by forms of free association – one might equally say that the philosophy which obsessed Marx, Lenin and Gramsci ought to be a ‘non-philosophy’ – that is, one which ceases to be produced in the form of a philosophy, whose function of theoretical hegemony will disappear in order to make way for new forms of philosophical existence.

Progress in autonomy cannot be – nor historically has it ever been – measured in quantitative units. Rather, the need for autonomy is repositioned in relation to society’s political, economic, and cultural developments on an ongoing basis. What do we mean when we speak of ‘autonomy’ and ‘reproduction’ in the field of contemporary art? What kind of objects do these terms encompass, what are their histories, and what internal logical relations can we identify between these concepts? How do they operate in a philosophical discourse about art and in political theory and practice? In this book, Marina Vishmidt and Kerstin Stakemeier analyse ‘autonomy’ and then ‘reproduction’, in the understanding that this method of categorical isolation must be overcome if we are to reach towards the relationship of the two terms. These three essays establish a new framework to locate notions of artistic autonomy and autonomies of art. The texts not only offer an entrance into thinking about the role th...