Situated at the interface of philosophy, aesthetics and art history, this collection brings together a series of creative responses to the recent speculative turn in Continental philosophy. It gives you both a genealogy of speculative art history and a provocatively experimental counter-discourse of new speculative art histories.The contributors include philosophers, art historians, architects and art practitioners who go beyond the mere complementarity of philosophy and art history. They are generous with the types of art they examine, including architecture, cinema, dance and new media, and the philosophical trajectories they engage with.Speculative Art Histories is published in association with Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam.
Sjoerd van Tuinen is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Coordinator of the Centre for Art and Philosophy. He is editor of numerous books, including Deleuze and the Passions (Punctum Books, 2016), Deleuze and The Fold: A Critical Reader (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Deleuze Compendium (Boom, 2009) and De Nieuwe Franse Filosofie (Amsterdam: Boom, 2011). He is the author of Sloterdijk: Binnenstebuiten Denken (Klement, 2004).
AcknowledgementsIntroductionSjoerd van Tuinen1 Asynchronous Present Past. Against the Regime of (Aesthetical) CorrelationismArmen Avanessian2 (Dis)enchanted Taiwanese Cinema, Schizoanalytic Belief, and the Actuality of AnimismErik BordeleauArt Historical Systems3 Attractors and Locked-In Art: Art History as a Complex SystemFrancis Halsall4 Enduring Habits and Artwares Adi Efal5 Mood (Stimmung) / Blandness (Fadeur): On Temporality and AffectivityVlad Ionescu6 The Plasticity of the Real: Speculative ArchitectureElisabeth von Samsonow7 Expressive Things: Art Theories of Henri Focillon and Meyer Schapiro ReconsideredKerstin Thomas8 Sympathy and Gothic ontologyLars Spuybroek9 Serpentine Life: The Nature of Movement in Gothic, Mannerism, and BaroqueSjoerd van Tuinen10 Space Always Comes After: It Is Good When It Comes After, It Is Good Only When It Comes AfterAndrej Radman11 Speculation, Critique, Constructivism: Notions for Art HistoryKamini Vellodi12 The Potentiality of Art, the Force of Images, and Aesthetic IntensitiesBertrand PrévostExperiments13 Impossible! Bergson after Duchamp after CailloisSarah Kolb14 Economies of the Wild: Speculations on Constant’s New Babylon and Contemporary CapitalismBram Ieven15 From Etienne Souriau’s L'ombre de Dieu to Mats Ek’s Shadow of CarmenFleur Courtois-l'HeureuxAuthor’s biographies
It was only a matter of time before the speculative turn in the theoretical humanities reached the rarefied halls of Art History. But here, in this creative and rigorous collection, such an encounter is also seen to be prefigured within the speculative impulses of Art History itself. The essays in this timely volume then perform a twin function: they attend to object-orientated philosophies, anti-correlationist aesthetics and the non-human; but also to that rich counter-tradition of Art History that has always attended to art’s own speculative and inventive becomings. A must read for anyone interested in both the future and other pasts of Art History, but also for those working within the expanded fields of art theory and Contemporary Art.
Sjoerd van Tuinen, Sjoerd van Tuinen, Erasmus University Rotterdam) van Tuinen, Sjoerd (Assistant Professor in Philosophy, Sjoerd Van Tuinen, Sjoerd van Tuinen