Discovered by Diversity: Error in Art as a Tool of Metaphysical Cognition. Case Studies

Abstracts

EN

The text starts with the assumption that a mistake understood in various ways can serve cognition on many levels. Examples from the field of aesthetics and contemporary art are described and interpreted. It is picturesqueness as a beauty “spoiled” by a mistake constituting an aesthetic value, an accidental breakage of Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass revealing an order different to the ordinary course of events and time, distortions in Stan Brakhage's structural film paradoxically revealing love, demonstrating cognitive imperfection of the senses in the interactive video staging of Samuel Beckett's Breath and in illusion constructed in Olafur Eliasson's Weather Project, critical use of ugliness to expose and criticize the system by Leon Golub's "bad drawing style", ironic music video by Laibach, or a subversive film by Martin Arnold, imbalances creating non-ordinary spaces in M. C. Esher's graphics, and errors programming new orders in the digital world of Jared Tarbell, and finally non-places exposed in in the "bad style" photographs of Edward Ruscha or used in installations by Grzegorz Sztabiński. Deliberate distortions, deformations, errors, mistakes, imperfections, accepted randomness or "parasitism" present in these works are presented as inquiries concerning cognitive possibilities and searches leading to the disclosure of spaces and orders different from those experienced daily, in which one can see the striving to achieve metaphysical cognition.

Keywords

EN

error; distortion; ugliness; paradox; discovery; cognition; metaphysics; aesthetics; contemporary art

• Publisher: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych w Gdańsku
• Journal: Sztuka i Dokumentacja
• Year: 2020
• Issue: 22
• Pages: 47-55

Dates

published

2020

Contributors

other

Rafał Solewski

• Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny im. Komisji Edukacji Narodowej w Krakowie

Identifiers

DOI

10.32020/ARTandDOC/22/2020/8