Aesthetics of Appearing (Cultural Memory in the Present)

This book proposes that aesthetics begin not with concepts of being or semblance, but with a concept of appearing. Appearing bespeaks of the reality that all aesthetic objects share, however different they may otherwise be. For Martin Seel, appearing plays its part everywhere in the aesthetic realm, in all aesthetic activity. In his book, Seel examines the existential and cultural meaning of aesthetic experience. In doing so, he brings aesthetics and philosophy of art together again, which in continental as well as analytical thinking have been more and more separated in the recent decades. Within Seel's framework, to apprehend things and events with respect to how they appear momentarily and simultaneously to our senses represents a genuine way for human beings to encounter the world. The consciousness that emerges here is an anthropologically central faculty. In perceiving the unfathomable particularity of a sensuously given we gain insight into the indeterminable of our lives. Attentiveness to what is appearing is therefore at the same time attentiveness to ourselves. This is also the case when works of art imagine past or future, probable or improbable presences. Artworks develop their transgressive energy from their presence as sense-catching forms. They bring about a special presence in which a presentation of close or distant presences comes about.

Politics & Social Sciences

Seel, Martin

Philosophy

Stanford University Press

This book proposes that aesthetics begin not with concepts of being or semblance, but with a concept of appearing. Appearing bespeaks of the reality that all aesthetic objects share, however different they may otherwise be. For Martin Seel, appearing plays its part everywhere in the aesthetic realm, in all aesthetic activity. In his book, Seel examines the existential and cultural meaning of aesthetic experience. In doing so, he brings aesthetics and philosophy of art together again, which in continental as well as analytical thinking have been more and more separated in the recent decades. Within Seel's framework, to apprehend things and events with respect to how they appear momentarily and simultaneously to our senses represents a genuine way for human beings to encounter the world. The consciousness that emerges here is an anthropologically central faculty. In perceiving the unfathomable particularity of a sensuously given we gain insight into the indeterminable of our lives. Attentiveness to what is appearing is therefore at the same time attentiveness to ourselves. This is also the case when works of art imagine past or future, probable or improbable presences. Artworks develop their transgressive energy from their presence as sense-catching forms. They bring about a special presence in which a presentation of close or distant presences comes about.

In The Arts of Cinema, Martin Seel explores film’s connections to the other arts and the qualities that distinguish it from them. In nine concise and elegantly written chapters, he explores the cinema’s singular aesthetic potential and uses specific examples from a diverse range of films―from Antonioni and Hitchcock to The Searchers and The Bourne Supremacy―to demonstrate the many ways this potential can be realized. Seel’s analysis provides both a new perspective on film as a comprehensive aesthetic experience and a nuanced understanding of what the medium does to us once we are in the cinema.

The Arts of Cinema

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Cornell University Press

Aktive Passivität: Über den Spielraum des Denkens, Handelns und anderer Künste

Biographies & Memoirs

FISCHER, S.

Die Künste des Kinos

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Ästhetik des Erscheinens (German Edition)

Hanser

Adornos Philosophie der Kontemplation.

Suhrkamp Verlag KG

Since the 1980s, when the English sculptor Antony Gormley (born 1950) first began casting figures from his own body in lead and iron, his principal concern has been opening up new artistic and social venues for the display of his work. In realizing his latest work, “Horizon Field,” in Austria, the artist has installed 100 figures at an elevation of nearly 7,000 feet; the figures face every direction but never towards one another. The mountain landscape, with its beguiling mix of natural beauty, urbanity and the sociality of old valley communities, provides an ideal experimental field for Gormley's investigations into the relationship between nature and culture. Of this project, the artist said: “It asks basic questions: who are we, what are we, where do we come from and to where are we headed?” Photographs of the landscape installation are contextualized with images of the artist's previous works.

Antony Gormley: Horizon Field

Wyss, Beat

Individual Artists

Kunsthaus Bregenz

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Books by Seel, Martin