International Yearbook of Aesthetics Volume 19, 2017 RETRACING THE PAST Historical continuity in aesthetics from a global perspective Edited by Zoltán Somhegyi International Association for Aesthetics Association Internationale d’Esthétique RETRACING THE PAST Historical continuity in aesthetics from a global perspective Edited by Zoltán Somhegyi The selection of essays in the 19th Yearbook of the International Association for Aesthetics aims to analyse the phenomenon of retracing the past, i.e. of identifying the signs, details and processes of the creative re-interpretation of long-lasting traditions both in actual works of art and in aesthetic thought, hence where the historical interconnectedness and the influence of earlier sources can appear. ISBN: 978-0-692-04826-9 INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR AESTHETICS Retracing the past INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK OF AESTHETICS Volume 19, 2017 INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK OF AESTHETICS Volume 19, 2017 Edited by Zoltán Somhegyi RETRACING THE PAST Historical continuity in aesthetics from a global perspective International Association for Aesthetics Association Internationale d’Esthétique Copyright: the Authors and the International Association for Aesthetics Acknowledgement: The Publication Committee of the International Association for Aesthetics, Tyrus Miller, Curtis Carter and Ales Erjavec, for reviewing the essays. Every effort has been made to obtain permissions to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Cover design: Ahmad Manar Laham Editor: Zoltán Somhegyi Published by the International Association for Aesthetics http://www.iaaesthetics.org/ Santa Cruz, California, 2017 ISBN: 978-0-692-04826-9 CONTENTS Introduction 7 Zoltán Somhegyi 1. The paradox of mimesis 9 In connection with Aristotle Béla Bacsó 2. Reflections on the subject of Antiquity and the future 23 Raffaele Milani 3. Contemplation or manipulation? 29 Aesthetic perspectives on nature and animals from Shaftesbury to bio-art Karl Axelsson & Camilla Flodin 4. The Painter in the landscape 42 Aesthetic considerations on a pictorial sub-genre Zoltán Somhegyi 5. Jan Gwalbert Pawlikowski 54 A forerunner of landscape aesthetics Mateusz Salwa 6. Mis-construction: 66 Changes in the arts and aesthetics East and West Curtis Carter 7. The woman-and-tree motif in the ancient and 79 contemporary India Marzenna Jakubczak 8. Semiology and/or anthropology of Western painting 94 Miško Šuvaković 9. A great future behind us 107 Exploded traditions, avant-garde pasts Tyrus Miller CONTENTS 10. Successiveness and simultaneity in 20th century aesthetics 118 Two models of “post-historical” art Rodrigo Duarte 11. Robert Motherwell and John Constable 131 Intra-subjectivity and time as determinants of serial painting in American Abstract Expressionism and British Romanticist landscape painting Manfred Milz 12. The Body of Evidence? 150 From Danto to Kant and back Zoltán Papp 13. Making history through anachronic imagining 165 Notes on art history and temporal complexities of the present Jacob Lund 14. Aesthetics in cyberspace 177 Contemporary mass culture and Korean Pop Jiun Lee-Whitaker 15. Rock me Amadeus 186 A lowbrow reading of high culture – or how to deal with high cultured appropriation? Max Ryynänen 16. The renewal of the past towards the future 197 The case of Jean Nouvel’s architecture Jale Erzen 17. Katsuhiro Miyamoto’s The Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear 211 Power Plant Shrine “Acting-out” and “working-through” Yoshiko Suzuki 18. Tokyo, the versatile city 234 Glimpses between postmodernity and tradition Federico Farnè Contributors 247 RETRACING THE PAST Historical continuity in aesthetics from a global perspective Introduction to the 19th Yearbook of the International Association for Aesthetics Zoltán Somhegyi Editor of the Yearbook Looking at modern and contemporary art production and its various forms of interpretation, including aesthetic analyses, art criticism, museum presentations, commercial exhibitions, curating and collecting, one can easily get the impression that overwhelming importance is often overtly placed on novelty. Both in art creation and in aesthetic discourse a parti- cular emphasis is given predominantly to this aspect; in fact, we can talk about a certain fetishism of the new: new ideas, new approaches, new ways of (self)-expression. The desperate striving for “the next new thing” is hyped and – as it usually happens with exaggeratedly praised qualities – is often over-estimated, especially in the case of such works that try to eradicate themselves from their historical context and antecedents, in a fake interpretation and ephemeral appearance of contemporaneity. Curiously however, the more these pieces try to deny their forerunners, the more easily they get caught up in relations to them. Nevertheless, we shall not forget that works of art, artists’ oeuvres and even aesthetic theories are never completely stand-alone and never entirely “new”, but are strongly – even if sometimes implicitly though – connected to their historical antecedents. This also explains that however much we are still in the midst of glittery celebration of the “brand new at any cost”, recently we can see growing awareness as well of interest in the “histo- rical-contemporary”, as Karen Rosenberg formulates it in a review on 7 ZOLTÁN SOMHEGYI Artspace.com.1 Both art professionals and avid art consumers, and what’s more, even the average interested wider public, are becoming more and more curious about the juxtaposing of the most recent works of art with older ones. Many get inspired by the fact that through the parallel investi- gation of the temporal layers more understanding and more sophisticated experience can be gained. This also describes the expanding tendency to show these direct connections or to make indirect connections more explicit: exhibitions that confront old and new artworks, re-elaborations of classic pieces of art and design, re-utilisations of derelict sites in contem- porary architecture, re-readings of theoretical texts and re-contextualisa- tions of different forms of the tradition. These crossover analyses can be enjoyed for example in the carefully curated booths of leading art fairs, in some of the progressive pavilions of the last edition of the Venice Bien- nial, during visits to the private collections of those art lovers who do not accumulate objects only as a status symbol but through them aim at gaining a deeper understanding of human culture, and in the aesthetic analyses of experimental forms of theoretical texts. The selection of essays in this Yearbook of the International Associa- tion for Aesthetics aims to analyse this phenomenon of retracing the past, i.e. of identifying the signs, details and processes of the creative re-inter- pretation of long-lasting traditions both in actual works of art and in aesthetic thought, hence where the historical interconnectedness and the influence of earlier sources can appear. The chapters investigate these ques- tions in a wide-ranging perspective and on a global scale, quoting subject- matter from classical aesthetic theories, painting, sculpture architecture, music, video, photography and literature, and in some cases referring to the growing dispute around the aesthetic status of popular culture. Apart from the range of their topics, moreover, the contributors themselves also cover a broad geographical range, thus illustrating how the converging interest in these analyses has been spotlighted by many colleagues around the world. The collection of essays thus invites the reader the join this global and cross-historical dialogue. 1 Karen Rosenberg, “In Search of Lost Time: How the Art World Dispensed With Chronology in 2015 (and Why 2016 Will Be the Year of the ‘Historical-Contem- porary’),” Artspace.com, accessed November 20, 2017. https://www. artspace. com/magazine/interviews_features/the_big_idea/how-the-art-world-dispensed- with-chronology-in-2015-53378 8 THE PARADOX OF MIMESIS In connection with Aristotle1 Béla Bacsó “It is by no means an accident that the law of mimesis can only be presented in the form of paradox.” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: Paradox und Mimesis2 Presumably we can state without further ado that perhaps there exists no single and final interpretation of mimesis that everyone fully agrees on, but perhaps everyone agrees on this much, that mimesis is not a procedure of presenting, imaging, imitating, conveying or representing, and so on, of reality that has been used since the beginnings when creating works of art. The interpretation of mimesis has been the subject of debate again and again in every age, but hardly because the debaters wished to understand better the notions of the Greek beginnings, Plato or Aristotle in that regard, but much rather because they sought justifications for the artistic practice and interpretations of their own age, or, as did many theoreticians of moder- nity, they asserted their own non-mimetic theories against the Greek conception. 1 Originally published in Hungarian in: Magyar Filozófiai Szemle (Hungarian Philosophical Review) 58 (2014/2). 2 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Paradox und Mimesis in Die Nachahmung der Modernen. Typographien II. trans. Thomas Schestag (Basel – Weil am Rhein – Wien: Urs Engeler Editor, 2003) 26. (French original: L’imitation des modernes. Typographies II. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1986.) 3 Cf. Arbogast Schmitt, trans., Aristoteles Poetik. in Aristoteles Werke in deutscher Übersetzung. Vol. 5. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008), Otfried Höffe (ed.) Aristoteles Poetik. Klassiker Auslegen