There is an exhibition in prison. It is called CRACK.
Catalog of the Group exhibition at the former prison in Weimar MFA-Programme "Public Art and New Artistic Strategies" in 2015.
Catalog of the Group exhibition at the former prison in Weimar
MFA-Programme "Public Art and New Artistic Strategies" in 2015.
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
question: What is Enlightenment” by Immanuel Kant, which was published three
months later in the same journal, Mendelssohn's text was a response to the request
from the Protestant pastor Johann Friedrich Zollner to clarify the Enlightenment
itself “before one begins to clarify” 3 anything else.
Let’s set aside how the Enlightenment understood the terms culture and education
and determined their respective social roles. The important thing to note is that we
owe their origins as well as their mutual relationship historically and conceptually to
the Enlightenment, which has essentially determined the historical development of
their meanings. Just as the Enlightenment played a crucial role in the preparation
of the French Revolution, the original German concept of education, implies the
focus of Moses Mendelssohn’s understanding of the Enlightenment, as a call for
changing the world. According to Reinhart Koselleck, one of its main characteristics
is precisely the idea that education offered from the outside is converted into
an autonomous demand from the individual to change the world. 4 The scene
of this world change by the end of the 18th century became history. It is also a
contemporary of the Enlightenment. The modern concept of history, which as
we learned from Koselleck, originated with the Enlightenment, is one of different
speeds and meanings of events of diversified temporality and at the same time a
new space of experience. In short, only with the Enlightenment, did history become
the subject that the modern world knows today.
To further complicate this already complex historical and conceptual constellation,
it should be recalled that at almost the same time (1785) and even in the same
place – the Berlin Monthly – the concept of the "autonomy of art" emerged. One
of the greatest names of classical Weimar, Karl Philipp Moritz, summed up the idea
of Fine Art as “perfected in itself”. Art, he claimed, doesn’t need a relationship to
anything other than itself. 5
That's in a nutshell what one should keep in mind about the history of our problem.
This history should not be ignored if you look at it as an artist, a cultural worker,
even as a citizen interested in culture, a member of the so-called educated class,
and what the question of the meaning and the importance of cultural education
represents as well as the role that art should play in it. The world has changed
a lot since education and culture encountered each other for the first time. The
Enlightenment, which once put these two phenomena in combination, disappeared
rather unheroicly from our historical horizon. Partially due to the dangerous
inconsistency exposed seventy years ago - in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic
of Enlightenment – which accused it of the worst crimes committed in the past
two centuries of mankind. The new historical revisionism, which is recently winning
increasing importance and influence, finds its rationale for the Gulag and Auschwitz
not least in the ideas of the Enlightenment.
History is no longer the subject. More than that, they say, it no longer exists. We
live in a post-historical period, as said by Fukuyama. The old German concept of
education is no longer. It became less important, or more accurately, it lost the
10