Toni Hildebrandt |
Toni Hildebrandt holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Basel and is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Bern. He was a Research Fellow at “eikones” at University of Basel and a member of “What Images Do”, a Research Network established in collaboration with TU Delft, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen. In 2013/14 he was a Resident Fellow and from 2015-2017 a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome, where he was preparing a book on Pier Paolo Pasolini endowed with a Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He is also teaching once a year as Guest Professor in the “Independent Study Programm” at the Visual Art School Maumaus in Lisbon.
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Michel Serres’ critique of the dialectics of centre and margin |
Michel Serres’ book on the natural contract opens with a remarkable interpretation of a famous painting from Goya, Fight with Cudgels (1830–23), where two enemies are fencing with each other, forgetting however thereby that their own theatrical scene is primarily staged on quicksand. [Michel Serres, Le Contrat naturel (Paris: François Bourin, 1990)] The more they fight in their rivalry, thus, the more they sink into the abyss. Serres reads the painting as an allegory of the dialectics of history, generally speaking as the rivalry between social forces from the political left and right, or more precisely: as an allusion to theories and historiographies speaking in the name of nameless people or the marginalized subaltern on the one side, and conservative ideologies that mourn the loss of a stable center on the other hand. As an allegory of history these distinctions, as Serres shows, are always already based on the social contract as defined by Rousseau, where nature is consequentially either forgotten or conceptually eternalized as a given. Faced however with unpredictable natural catastrophes, Serres had already in the 1990s conceived a new natural contract that would recognize how social conflicts are primarily embedded in ecological and environmental circumstances and become thus themselves “marginalized”. This new contract requires according to Serres a sublation of traditional categories embroiled in and differentiated by dualisms such as center and margin, global and local or horizontal and vertical. Such a reshaping of categories can best be done with a focus on concrete cases and artworks, which introduce, but also take distance from a self-complacent “aesthetics of the natural contract”. Firstly, one year after Serres published The Natural Contract, a research project, Biosphere 2, was inaugurated in Oracle, Arizona with the aim to create nothing less than a second biospherical world. In comparison with Serres’ philosophical proposal my talk will discuss the futurist aesthetics of Biosphere 2 inspired by Buckminster Fuller to secondly relate it to the narration of three films of Ben Rivers, one of them having been a commission of his 2016 exhibition at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. For the conference this ought to be insightful since Rivers’ work cinematographically document both the modernist “utopia” of Biosphere 2 in the center of its attention in the US around 1991 and its potential representation as a (post-)apocalyptic “ruin”, thus in its “marginal” or allegorical remain and afterlife. |