19 EUR

The Transformacije collection, No. 46
Format: 240 x 170 mm
© Maska, Ljubljana, 2021

This book was published in Slovenian.

The TRANSformacije Collection

Bojana Kunst: The Life of Art: Transversal Lines of Care

19 EUR

The Life of Art: Transversal Lines of Care is a work on the problems art encounters with care. The author writes about the processes, work, and creating art, the need for changing the values existing in the field of art. The book describes the numerous paradoxes of the life of art, especially art dealing with the state of the world, the ecology crisis, and the contemporary precarious lives, and art testifying to the suffering of others. Care does not thwart material practices, does not question the production and economic processes of art; it is often only maintained as a flexible rhetorical and performative power that keeps the existing values by only slightly improving them.

Many works of art and artistic environments have trouble with the asymmetry of care; this disables them from facing their own empathic and bodily privilege, or the place from which they can enunciate and show their care. Such asymmetries are closely tied to contemporary colonialism which is ongoing, but also to the capitalist management and evaluation of art.

Through feminist and decolonial thought, the new book by Bojana Kunst analyses these paradoxes, giving case studies of artworks and art actions to show and imagine how art can live a life different to the one we know. The interconnectedness of life and art also means a reshaping of economic, structural, and institutional backing of art – not just by enabling a greater representation, but also by a different poetic sharing and privatisation of art, by the processes of expropriation and appropriation, by the circulation of art and art parties. This is a fugitive life of art where terms, practices, and gestures must constantly be abandoned, for they have already been taken away from precarious lives.

The Transformacije collection, No. 46
Format: 240 x 170 mm
© Maska, Ljubljana, 2021

This book was published in Slovenian.

Excerpt

Care confronts art with a rather complex question and undermines the legitimacy of compassion: if we care, it is no longer about ourselves, and if it is no longer about ourselves, it profoundly interferes with and changes the ways in which art happens, how it is named and how it reaches us. In the suffering and life of human beings, and of those more than human, art is concerned with the liminality of existence, which rattles its own legitimacy. When art becomes braided with life and allows itself to be touched by it, it becomes an excess, an exception, something for which we have no name, let alone forms of visibility. Its autonomy is no longer braided around the notion of the human, but it is rather more than human. That is why these tacky, enmeshed, fragile and precarious lives go beyond the comfortable transition between art and life and demand a different kind of engagement, one that deeply unsettles even our own secure positions of enunciation and the categories with which we are equipped to be able to extricate ourselves at a given moment. Only in this way can we touch and confront the limits of existence and the erasure of life we are witnessing today through human, environmental and social changes.

About the Author

Bojana Kunst is a philosopher, dramaturge, and contemporary performing art theorist. A long-time member of the Maska collective, she has headed its international Contemporary Performing Arts Seminar and her works form one of the pillars of Maska publishing. Since 2012, she has been a professor at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies, Justus Liebig University Gießen, where she is head of the international master’s programme Choreography and Performance. Completing her doctoral studies of aesthetics, she did her postdoc at the University of Ljubljana and University of Antwerp and was a visiting professor at the University of Hamburg. Her research focuses mainly on the intersections of poetical and political processes of creation in dance, performance, and visual arts. Her works combine philosophical reflection, her practical experience from dramaturgy, art, and research, and the theory of art. She is the author of books and articles translated into numerous languages – among others: Višnje v čokoladi (Apokalipsa 1995), Nemogoče telo (Maska 1997), Nevarne povezave (Maska 2004). Her work Umetnik na delu: bližina umetnosti in kapitalizma (Maska 2013) was also published in English (Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism) and Polish.

Photo: Ernst Thürnau

Translations

A German translation of the book was published by transversal texts in September 2023. The publication is part of the Peripheral Visions project.
The translaton was supported by Slovenian Book Agency.

Das Leben der Kunst: Transversale Linien der Sorge

Translation by Alfred Leskovec
Editor: Stefan Nowotny

transversal texts, September 2023
in collaboration with Maska, Ljubljana
438 pages, paperback

€ 20,00

In October 2023, a Croatian translation of the book was published in cooperation with the Multimedia Institute – MaMa and Kulturtreger – Booksa. The publication is part of the Peripheral Visions project. The publication was supported by the Slovenian Book Agency.

Život umjetnosti: Poprečne linije brige

– Translated by Mario Kopić
– Editor: Aleš Mendiževec

Maska Publishing, October 2023
193 pages, paperback

€ 19,00

You can buy the book here.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.

German translation of the book is part of the Peripheral Visions project, whose partners are Kulturtreger, Maska Ljubljana, EIPCP, Kuda.org, Kontrapunkt Skopje, Multimedia Institute.

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