thinking about art after the mediaapprentice from zadamowice. and Ritter’s lecture on ‘physics as art’ was a prominent
item in Beuys’ personal library.
an anthropological intermediate step: Vilém FlusserRitter’s anthropology of the arts was positive, constructive, and open. it is constituted by
a specific attitude toward research, which i think is important for the future. For Ritter
the new era, which he associated with the discovery of electricity, was an opportunity
to forge ahead, to create something new that the world had not yet experienced or
conceived of in quite the same manner. We should not fall back behind the state of
knowledge of c.1800 when we discuss how artistic research can be generated today.
For this we shall need the ideas of another exceptional mind from eastern europe:
Vilém Flusser, a philosopher of culture from prague, who the nazis drove out initially
to england, and then to são paulo in Brazil, and who died in 1991 in such a crazy
unnecessary way. on the way back from prague to the south of France, where he had
lived since 1974, Flusser died in a car accident, just after he had attended a symposium
that had been organized in his birthplace in his honour.
Vilém Flusser was a most lively and energetic thinker, who concurred with nietzsche
that philosophy ought to be danced more than written. he developed an anthropology,
which has much in common with Ritter’s. i shall abbreviate his argumentation because
it is in part a repetition of Ritter’s universe. The cultural philosopher from prague speaks
in his earliest work phase of the lifeworld, the temporal- spatial orientation of humans
in four dimensions from which it proceeds via the three- dimensional experience with
an object, a house, to the two- dimensional image. everything which takes place in
these qualities of history and civilization implies for Flusser classical activity of the
imagination with regard to communication. The decisive break for Flusser happened
genealogically, when the (one- dimensional) text became dominant culturally, also
with regard to the critical interrogation of images, objects, and lifeworld experience.
This is Critical Theory, which we are very familiar with from the history of ideas.
script is its classical medium. afterwards, for Flusser, there was again a qualitative turn,
which proceeded via the zero dimension of numbers, of algorithms. Things, including
images, become technical, and tend toward the general. This development from the
one- dimensionality of the text to the zero dimensionality of numbers Flusser calls
the development from the abstract to the concrete. This operational anthropology of
Flusser’s, whose universe of thought i can but sketch here, is particularly remarkable
because it is an anthropology that is open to the future. like Ritter’s, it seeks to open
up new possibilities for action.
Flusser, who hailed from the city of Rudolf ii, and many alchemists, did not tend
toward the apocalyptic view. The passage through zero dimensions, numbers, and
machines that treat and generate images like concepts, Flusser did not regard as a
disaster, as the end of experience, but as a space of opportunities through which one
could rethink the world anew, re- engage with it. here a man speaks of a future that can
be shaped, whose own experience of the physical lifeworld had been truly terrible. most
of his family was murdered by the nazis in the death camps, and many of his friends
as well. Flusser experienced what the monsters who are also accounted members of
humankind were capable of. he also formulated this provocatively: machines cannot