Übungen zur Moderne – Internal training by Steffen Zillig on the ambivalent (non-)relationship between contemporary art and underclass, i.e. between artistic autonomy and materialistic reality and the creeping displacement of both.
Resources: Steffen Zillig, "Ästhetik des Asozialen"
Steffen Zillig: "Most people will know that the word 'asozial' has a history, that in National Socialism it was used to brand people with murderous consequences and that it is still used as a swearword in everyday life. However, I am concerned with conditions that I call "asozial", because for the people who living in them, they mean almost complete exclusion from social functional contexts. These conditions are therefore a-social in the sense of the word, non-social or outside of the social." (Photo: Andrzej Steinbach)Theodor W. Adorno: "The purity of bourgeois art, which hypostatized itself as a realm of freedom in contrast to material practice, was bought from the outset with the exclusion of the underclass, to whose cause, the true general public, art remains loyal precisely through its freedom from the purposes of the false general public." (Photo: Andrzej Steinbach)(Photo: Andrzej Steinbach)Steffen Zillig: "So the problem is not the bourgeois game of art itself. The problem is, as so often in the history of the bourgeoisie, that we confuse our own noble game with reality, the game of equality with real equality, the game of diversity with genuine diversity and no longer even realize who we are leaving out again." (Photo: Andrzej Steinbach)(Photo: Andrzej Steinbach)(Photo: Steffen Zillig)back
