Making Strange: Beauty, Sublimity, and the (Post)Modern ''Third Aesthetic'' (Postmodern Studies)

205 Pages·2008·2.91 MB·English

by  Herbert Grabes

Making Strange
Postmodern Studies 42
Series
edited by
Theo D’haen
and
Hans Bertens
Making Strange
Beauty, Sublimity, and the
(Post)Modern 'Third Aesthetic'

Herbert Grabes
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008
Cover image: Salvador Dalí, Schlaf (50 x 77 cm), ca. 1937
© 2004 A. Francke Verlag Tübingen und Basel
English translation by Marc Colavincenzo from Einführung in die Literatur
und Kunst der Moderne und Postmoderne: Die Ästhetik des Fremden
(Tübingen & Basel: Francke, 2004), with further editing by Gordon Collier.
Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2433-5
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2008
Printed in The Netherlands
Table of Contents

List of Colour Plates ix
Introductory Note xi

1
The Aesthetic of the Strange
Not Beautiful, but Strange 1
Not Sublime, but Strange 7
The Aesthetic of the Strange 11

2
The Strange Art and Literature of Modernism
Radical Strangeness in Early Modernism 19
1 ALTERNATIVE REALITIES PRESENTED IN UNUSUAL WAYS 22
The Unfamiliar Metaphors of Expressionism; The Strange
Objectivism of the Cubists; The Estranging Montage of the
Heterogeneous in the Collage; The Wholesale Break with
Tradition: Abstract Art; The Provocative Expansion of the
Definition of Art: Dada and Ready-Mades; The Strange World of
Surrealism; Stream of Consciousness
2 THE WIDENING OF EXPERIENCE 43
Experiments with Form and New Modes of Perception; The Need
for Explanatory Theory
3 THE UTOPIA OF RENEWAL 46
The Renewal of Art; The Renewal of Literature
Varieties of Strangeness in the Later Phase of Modernism 54
1 THE INTENSIFICATION OF EARLY MODERNIST
TENDENCIES IN ART 55
Abstract Expressionism; The Elite Artistic Status of the Trivial;
Kinetic Art and Op Art
2 THE CONTINUATION AND INTENSIFICATION
OF LITERARY CONCEPTS 62
The Theatre of the Absurd and the ‘nouveau roman’; German
Followers of Brecht, Concrete Poetry, American Anti-Formalism
of the Beat Generation

3
The Strange Art and Literature of Postmodernism
New Radicalness in the Early Phase of Postmodernism 67
1 THE RELATIVIZATION OF THE FAMILIAR 69
Irony, Parody, Travesty; The Mixture of Styles and Genres; The
Expansion of the Realm of Art and Literature
2 THE CELEBRATION OF TRANSIENCE AND THE ARBITRARY 81
The Shift From the Work to Process; The Construction of the
Contingent and Arbitrary; The Reduction to Pure Possibility
3 THE HORROR GAME 98
The Strange as Subtle Difference
in the Later Phase of Postmodernism 102
1 VARIATION AND INTERTEXTUALITY 105
“Neo” Art and the Post-Avantgarde; Realist Narrative Made
Strange; The Return to Earlier Dramatic Genre Conventions; The
Aesthetic of Subtle Difference
2 RECOURSE TO THE NEW MEDIA AND FOREIGN CULTURES 115
New Media and Foreign Cultures in Art; New Literary Utopias
and Cultural Hybrids
3 THE COMPETITION OF THE SIMULTANEOUS 119

4
The Aesthetic of the Strange as the Aesthetic
of Modernism and Postmodernism 125

5
Theoretical Foundations
of the Aesthetic of the Strange 133
Disinterested Pleasure; Universal Pleasure and the Free Play of
the Imagination; Aesthetic Processes; The Release of the
Imagination Through Boundedness; The Beautiful, The Ugly, and
the Alienating; Kant’s “Aesthetic Ideas”; Beautiful Art, Nature,
and Alienating Art; The Beautiful as a Symbol of the Morally
Good and the Strangeness of Art as a Symbol of the Unstable
Distinction Between Subject and ‘World’, Culture and ‘Nature’

Works Cited 165

List of Colour Plates (after page 132)

Figure 1 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Liegender blauer Akt mit Strohhut [Re-
clining Blue Nude with Straw Hat] (68x72 cm; oil on cardboard,
1909). Sammlung Franz Burda, Offenburg.
Figure 2 Georges Braque, Violin et palette [Violin and Palette] (91.7x42.8
cm; oil on canvas, September 1909). Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York.
Figure 3 Pablo Picasso, Verre et bouteille de Suze [Glass and Bottle of Suze]
(65.4x50.2; collage: pasted paper, charcoal and goauche, Novem-
ber/December 1912). Washington University Gallery of Art, St.
Louis, Missouri.
Figure 4 Wassily Kandinsky, Schwarze Linien Nr. 189 [Black Lines No.
189] (129.5x130.2 cm; oil on canvas, December 1913). Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Figure 5 Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm (121x35.5 cm;
readymade: snow shovel, wood, and galvanized iron, 1915).
Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, Indiana
Figure 6 Salvador Dalí, El sueño [Sleep] (51x77; oil on canvas, 1937). Pri-
vate collection.
Figure 7 Mark Rothko, Untitled (183x153 cm; oil on canvas, 1959). National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.