History lessons: imitation, work and the temporality of contemporary art

• Autores: Jonathan Bordo
• Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 37, Nº. 4, 2014 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Theorizing imitation in a global context / coord. por Paul Duro), págs. 806-825
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • This essay begins with a consideration of Goethe's Medusa and the special significance that he assigns to the imitation of the ancients as a necessary preparation for art in the advancement of human progress. The word imitation assumes a particular cultural form, establishing the work of art in contrast both to art in the service of mimesis and art as technological replication. This distinction prepares an account of Walter Benjamin's aesthetic theory of the aura as a chorography of pace and its loss as if the task of art is to create itself as the substitute for a lost place. The essay concludes with a study of a contemporary work of art, Micha Ullman's Bibliothek, as a memorial that returns art to the common world just as some environmental art, Goldsworthy for example, seeks to bring its art into the commons of nature. With contemporary art, imitation is manifested as a return to the world, abandoned by modern pictorialism and pursued with unchecked vehemence in the era of digital reprodution.