If you are having trouble with the NLR website, please provide details here, and we will try to improve the site accordingly.
Articles by Sven Lütticken
-
Performance Art After TV
in NLR 80, March-April 2013, pp. 109-130
Subjects: Art , Media
Relations between TV and performance art since the 1960s as a tangled skein of complicity and contestation. Sven Lütticken traces shifts in modes of acting, working and self-presentation, within a televisual world itself now being absorbed by cybernetic and digital systems.
Read this article or download a PDF file
-
Dialectic of Dionysus
in NLR 76, July-August 2012, pp. 119-127
Subjects: Aesthetics , Biography and Intellectual History
Sven Lütticken on Asger Jorn, Fraternité Avant Tout. The Danish artist and Situationist wrestles with Engels and Nietzsche.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
Playtimes
in NLR 66, November-December 2010, pp. 125-140
Subjects: Aesthetics , Philosophy
Once deemed extinct, the play instinct now pervades the worlds of work and leisure. Can it be turned to radical ends? Sven Lütticken seeks clues in Schiller and Debord, Neuschwanstein and computer games.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
Attending to Abstract Things
in NLR 54, November-December 2008, pp. 101-122
Subjects: Aesthetics , Philosophy
From the philosophe De Brosses in the eighteenth century to the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman and the conceptualist Sol LeWitt in the twentieth—via Hegel, Creuzer and Marx—the fates of the fetish and the commodity, in critical thought and art.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
Unnatural History
in NLR 45, May-June 2007, pp. 115-131
Subjects: Literature , Philosophy
Do increasingly dark ecological portents indicate a deeper transformation of nature itself? Sven Lütticken elaborates a historicized conception of nature, seeking precedents and contrasts in 19th- and 20th-century philosophies and fictions. Dinosaurs and overmen, Geist and entropic decline in Verne, Nietzsche, Schelling and Smithson.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
Idolatry and its Discontents
in NLR 44, March-April 2007, pp. 107-119
Subjects: Aesthetics , Art , Netherlands
Amid rhetorical dust-storms over purported Islamist threats to Western values, Sven Lütticken finds antecedents for contemporary struggles over the image in Judaic and Protestant bans on idolatry. Multiple meanings of the veil and varying forms of iconoclasm, under the aegis of the spectacle.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
Suspense and . . . Surprise
in NLR 40, July-August 2006, pp. 95-109
Subjects: Aesthetics , Cinema , Media
Media projections of the ‘war on terror’ as manipulations of shock and time, purveyed through a perpetual present of 24-hour coverage and on-line news. Lessons from Hitchcock, Conrad and Benjamin on the poetics of suspense and possibilities for a rehistoricization of the attentat.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
The Feathers of the Eagle
in NLR 36, November-December 2005, pp. 109-125
Subjects: Aesthetics , Art
Lifting, swiping, zapping: popular expressions that have been aesthetic tactics since Dada. Sven Lütticken recasts the history of such practices of appropriation—not excluding those of Warhol or Debord, sometimes misplaced—as so many exercises in mythology. Anticipated by Flaubert, theorized by Barthes, staged by Broodthaers, is time running out for such creative misuses of past or present, as ‘intellectual property rights’ tighten?
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
After the Gods
in NLR 30, November-December 2004, pp. 83-103
Subjects: Aesthetics , Art
Mythology as the ‘condition and subject of all art’ in the varying conceptions of the early German Romantics and neoclassicism: from Schelling and Schlegel to Winckelmann and Goethe, meditations on Laocoon and anticipations of the Gesamtkunstwerk—issuing into the uncanny mythopoeias of modernity in Melville’s Confidence Man and the White Whale.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
Planet of the Remakes
in NLR 25, January-February 2004, pp. 103-119
Subjects: Art , Cinema
From Hollywood retreads to avatars of Dr Mabuse and re-creations of Solaris, the mimetic planet. Dialectic of repetition and historicity in the remake, reviled mainstay of the culture industry—and manifesto for a radical reappropriation of the form.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
Stripes, No Stars
in NLR 20, March-April 2003, pp. 160-166
Subjects: Aesthetics , Art
Sven Lütticken on Daniel Buren, Mot à Mot. Could a collaboration between avant-garde artist and sociologist escape the logic of the spectacle, or must it in some fashion reproduce it? Bourdieu’s last notes on art, with a view of Paris rooftops.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
Secrecy and Publicity
in NLR 17, September-October 2002, pp. 129-148
Subjects: Aesthetics , Art
Can the legacies of the classical avant-gardes be renewed as effective strategies in postmodern conditions, or are they condemned to mere pastiche? After Bataille, Warhol and Smithson, the possibilities of counter-media, and uncertainties of counter-publics.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
The Art of Theft
in NLR 13, January-February 2002, pp. 89-104
Subjects: Art
From Dürer to Barbie Doll, icons and images have been illicitly copied, quoted, parodied and purloined. As corporations wage war on such misappropriations in the name of copyright today, how far do the arts of détournement and culture jamming offer radical applications of a classical tradition?
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
Parklife
in NLR 10, July-August 2001, pp. 111-118
Subjects: Aesthetics
From the zoological garden, via the nature reserve and the theme-town, to the TV reality-show—sequences from the evolution of ‘parklife’. Disney and Waco, Sloterdijk and Deleuze, Spielberg and Smithson, as prisms for the fate of postmodern space.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
From Media to Mythology
in NLR 6, November-December 2000, pp. 134-143
Subjects: Aesthetics , Art , World Economy and Globalization
From Lessing to Greenberg, criticism of the arts was founded on the distinctions made between them. Does technology today irreversibly ruin these? Sven Lütticken asks what a radical practice that accepted convergence between artistic media would look like.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish