2011
liberalis ∙
regarding freedom ∙ a dance of understanding
The Impulse for Liberty in Art and the Body Politic –
Pursuit of Liberty ∙ Pursuit of Happiness
What is meant is actually the same, the fact that without liberty no Pursuit
of Happiness
is possible!
The themes for the annual exhibition project of KUNST+PROJEKTE Sindelfingen
e.V.
make reference to current concerns. This year, the theme is the impulse for
liberty, and also prompted to a great extent by the project of the preceding
year:
… the hybrid fuels … fueling the hybrid – two+ identities allow a strong
whole to emerge,
not only technologically but also in society.
The impulse for liberty as a driving force, while the
early 1960s stand out as the most recent time period of artistic/social developments – as is
also shown in the esteem for the artistic movements of that time (Fluxus/performance,
Arte povera, Pop Art, Land Art, Minimal and Conceptual Art, etc.) – trends
in art of great creative openness with a view to the recipients (art for which
Asian art institutions, surprisingly, are willing to pay high prices today).
Has the desire for freedom in our culture today become deferred to strategies
of social democratization? (whereby it is no longer social liberty, understood
as “recognition” (Hegel), that is of central interest).
Alicja Kwade:
52°31'17,23", 13°24'02,64", 2011
We addressed artists of various generations who work
internationally. They come forward with individual works – poetic,
resistant, with aesthetic power also inspiring political individuals. Their
works go across media and cannot be ascribed to any particular style.
The impulse for liberty in art goes hand in hand with the desire for liberty
in the economy and society. In our exhibition project liberalis,
we will trace the desire for liberty in the body politic and
follow socio-political/economic tracks. Since it the body politic (the
community as a whole) through which artists move in an emphatically individual manner.
On the one hand, the impulse for liberty is invoked as
a socio-political force as a result of the challenges posed by technical
innovations and globalization, as in the most recent publication by the philosopher
Axel Honneth: “Das
Recht der Freiheit” (The Right to Freedom, an analysis of social spheres:
close private relationships, the market economy, and the polis (according to
Hegel)). On the other, as a central idea of liberalism, it has undergone an
impalpably changing assessment with the manifold change in the meaning of the
term.
We have invited two research institutes that have addressed the impulse for
liberty scientifically: the Eucken Institut in Freiburg with
its focus on economics/social philosophy, and the Archiv des Liberalismus
in Gummersbach with its political/social emphases. The
scientists in Freiburg have been developing concepts relating to freedom since
the 1930s in resistance to National Socialism, concepts that after the war
particularly shaped the constitution and the social market economy of the Federal
Republic. The ongoing intellectual striving for the understanding of what constitutes
liberty, what threatens it –, it is the openness for the unforeseeable
that has shaped the Freiburg School of Ordoliberalism.
The archive in Gummersbach, which is more politically
oriented, is significant for our context in the sense of Friedrich August
von Hayek: “The task
of the social philosopher can only be influence on public opinion, but not
the organizing of people to action.”
These thoughts carried forward to the present day: as a preview (and for the
Long Night of the Museums), a prominent resident of Sindelfingen, Wolfgang
Klotz (Chairman of the Board of Managing Directors of the Vereinigte Volksbank
AG) will ascend one of the two pulpits that we set up in the entrance hall
of the gallery and defend his social/economic policy ideas in a Disputatio
(ca. 15 min.). A scientist and economist, Prof. Dr. Lars Feld, the current
Director of the Eucken Institut, Freiburg, will give his Disputatio from the
second pulpit.
The project takes place in an art museum, the Gallery
of the City of Sindelfingen. Visitors to the gallery can experience how art
rubs up against the socio-political/legal/economic forces of the body politic – such as Yona Friedman’s credo: ‘Architecture
without Building’;
Marcus Steinweg’s: Art and Philosophy; Johannes Wald’s sculptural
subsistence: “studying the Greeks’ grace” … An unforgettable
wellspring: “… because it is beauty through that we arrive at
freedom” (Schiller).
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