“Pour Une Nouvelle Esthetique” presented by Costa
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Aesthetics of the Virtual
Presentation Title:
- Pour Une Nouvelle Esthetique
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
Abstract (Intro)
The signs of a change in the field of aesthetic production, which are now evident, are actually beginning to appear in some fundamental components of the avant-gardes of the first decades of the twentieth century. I will give only a few examples that are of particular importance:
-In 1920, Naum Gabo wrote a ‘manifesto’ where a breakdown of the artistic dimension occurred, in which we explicitly asked to introduce the scientific spirit: “The plumb line in our hands […] we build our work […] – he writes – as the engineer builds the bridges, as the mathematician formulates the formulas of the orbits “(Manifesto of Realism, 1920).
-In Moholy-Nagy, whose role in aesthetic research should be reconsidered and carefully evaluated, the trend towards scientific knowledge is specified as the awareness of the basic character of materials and technologies, and their experimental aesthetic activation purified of all content symbolic or imaginary; The expulsion of Itten from the Bauhaus in 1923, with the consequent elimination of all the mystical and expressionist inclinations of the school, and the appointment of Moholy as director of the Preliminary Course are events that mark the history of Western aesthetic experimentation.
-Moholy’s work, interrupted in Europe by Nazism, resumes in the United States and is continued by György Kepes, his student and great friend: the New Bauhaus, the Chicago Institute of Design, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, take root and universally spread a new way of conceiving and proceeding in which techno-science and aesthetic experimentation begin to merge and merge giving life to a type of production substantially different from all the productions attributed to the traditional field of the artistic.
These products have been taken over and assimilated to the art for absolutely extra-aesthetic reasons. In reality, profoundly different movements have been unified in the term “avant-garde”, namely:
1) Movements that in many ways have pursued and tried to renew the tradition.
2) Movements that have manifested an explicit intention to break with art and to destroy.
3) Movements that worked for the transcendence of art and for a reconstitution aesthetics on the basis of the undeniable advent of techno-science.
