Academic literature on the topic 'Borderline Aesthetics'

Introduced by the ‘junk’ and beat aesthetics in the late 1950s, the figure of the dropout or slacker served as a counter-cultural model for artists concerned with precariousness, and took on various forms later in that decade. Celebrating leisure and laziness as a challenge to the capitalist work ethic, artists such as Tom Marioni, as well as groups such as Fluxus or ‘funk’ artists on the West Coast, appeared as concerned with their daily experiences as with creating any specific artwork, thus pursuing an ‘art of living’, as Fluxus artist Robert Filliou called it. Other artists in the 1960s questioned the value of work by developing what Allan Kaprow called ‘useless work’ — types of labour that involve effort, but yield no lasting product or outcome. While such ‘good-for-nothing’ figures pursued the Zen ideal of wu-shih or ‘nothing special’ that had inspired both junk practices and ‘borderline’ art in the early 1960s, other artists looked for inspiration to the ‘adversity’ of some of the poorest members of society (in the case of Hélio Oiticica).

This chapter argues that the Romantic familiar essay privatizes and idealizes the essay’s inherent epistemological ambiguity. While for Addison, Hume, and Johnson, the essayist moderates communication at the borderline of systematic science and the public sphere, for Hazlitt and his contemporary Charles Lamb, the ‘public’ could no longer function as the ground for epistemic solidarity. Once the social intellect of the Scottish Enlightenment was moved into the private domain of consciousness and individual imagination, the essayist was increasingly seen as mediating between idealized phenomenological realms of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ experience. Consequently, the ludic indeterminacy of the Romantic imagination is oriented by a purely aesthetic purposiveness: its playfulness expresses not the pragmatic presuppositions of communication, but the dark foundations of experience. In aestheticizing the communicative intellect of the eighteenth-century essayists, the identity doublings and performances of the Romantic familiar essay acquire significance as the hypostatized others of a lost wholeness.

A series of colorfully enameled metal vessels name forts along Hadrian’s Wall in Britain. They preserve creative responses to one of the empire’s most ambitious construction projects, a complex fortification system that was never represented in official art. Three well-preserved vessels have been recorded in England and northern France, and more fragmentary examples continue to be registered with England’s Portable Antiquities Scheme. The designs of this expanding corpus draw on six key elements: a vessel shape popular throughout the empire; enameling technology associated with the Celtic peoples of the empire’s northern lands; letters of the Latin alphabet; place names in the Celtic language; a fortified wall motif with precedents in Hellenistic court mosaics; and a triskel motif common in Celtic metalwork. These intricate portrayals conjure a place that was far more than a wall, while illustrating the entangled aesthetics of an evolving borderland.

This chapter focuses on the significance of skin in neoclassical art and aesthetics. The most distinctive features of neoclassicism - an emphasis on the contour and a preference for more finished surfaces - are understood as elements crucial for the visual formation and understanding of the human body, its surface and borderlines. The culture of neoclassicism, extending well beyond the realm of art and art discourse, was generally characterised by a heightened concern with the shaping of the body and the safeguarding of its boundaries. Skin as the body's physical demarcation, was increasingly perceived not merely as an envelope and organ, but as the boundary of the self. The chapter considers the new attention to skin and contour in late eighteenth-century French art discourse, in particular in Watelet's and Levesque's Dictionnaire des beaux-arts. It equally looks at the discussion of membranes and the definition of skin as ‘sensitive limit‘ in the works of anatomist Xavier Bichat and analyses a set of portraits by Jacques-Louis David painted in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

In the early 1920s the artist Ben Nicholson and his first wife Winifred Dacre moved to the edge of the English-Scottish border. Within a rugged terrain traditionally imagined as primitive, elemental, and romantic, a culture of crafts and especially of textile production emerged to which artists such as the Nicholsons were to contribute, but which was dependent on increasingly modernising traditions and the skills of resident makers and designers from each side of the border. Ysanne Holt concentrates in this chapter upon the specificity of this place in the 1920s and 1930s, exploring diverse connections between artists, crafts-people, designers, and manufacturers, the training and experience of workforces and the developing networks that crossed from rural to urban contexts within the region and beyond. She discovers a ‘borderland’ aesthetic that brought traditional skills into line with new technologies and combined national and international sources with local histories and heritage.

The decision to excavate a modern cemetery in the heart of Copenhagen prompted questions which revealed how the sensitive borderlines surrounding the recent dead are dealt with by archaeologists. When the plans for a new metro line were revealed in Copenhagen, the location of one station within a historic cemetery was controversial. Assistens cemetery is an early example of a landscape, or garden, cemetery (Rugg 1998; Tarlow 2000), designed and ordered according to fashionable contemporary garden principles and aesthetics. It has remained a much-loved place where famous personalities are buried as well as many ordinary citizens of Copenhagen. Although burial within the cemetery has become increasingly rare, it is still in occasional use for new interments and for gardens of remembrance for the burial and disposal of ashes. However, in the 1980s changing municipal plans for the cemetery re-designated large sections of it as a park, as described in Helweg and Linnée Nielsen (2010). This change of status enabled the Copenhagen metro company (Metroselskabet) to consider the placement of a station in one corner of the cemetery. Excavation of this site from 2009 to 2011 resulted in the archaeological recording of the material culture of the cemetery including around one thousand burials, their grave-pits, funerary material culture, and some aspects of the working life of the cemetery (Anthony et al. 2016). Assistens cemetery was originally created in 1760 and later expanded in 1805/6. The excavation focused on the north-west corner of the 1805/6 extension, an area surrounding a cemetery administration building (graverbolig). The area was filled by the mid-nineteenth century and continued to be used intensively for the next hundred years. In the latter part of the twentieth century, coffin burial became less frequent but continued until the 1980s. The occasional placement of cremation urns began in the early twentieth century and continued in large numbers into the 1990s (Helweg and Linnée Nielsen 2010). Burial is now uncommon in the entire cemetery and only takes place in special circumstances. In contrast to UK cemetery regulations, Danish law allows for graves to be removed after only twenty years, so there is the possibility of reusing grave plots after this short period by removing the previous coffins.