TY - CHAP

T1 - Comfort in Contemporary Art

T2 - Shadow Works Against the Background of Blumenberg’s Notion of ‘Comfort in the Cave’

AU - Breidbach, Angela

PY - 2020/10/2

Y1 - 2020/10/2

N2 - One of the key dimensions of comfort is ‘consolation’. It is through the sharingof stories that we console each other. The art of comforting hence is the art ofstorytelling.As an art historian,I am interested in how consoling narratives unfoldin visual art, or, more specifically, in what I call ‘shadow works’ in contemporaryart. This genre evolved from analogue shadow theatres with their long tradition inChina, India, Greece, and Turkey, including modern versions like Henri Rivière’sshadow plays for the Cabaret Chat Noir or similar contemporary installations.Eversince Lotte Reiniger’s early shadow films, the tradition can also be found in filmicordigitalanimations–allofwhichconjureuptheplayoflightandshadowwithinacave (Reiniger 1970,1979).The shadow is a complex figure,which,as I will show,notonly serves as a model for metaphor but also as a source of comfort on the creativeside and on the receiving side. This can be seen especially well in the works bythe contemporary artists Hans-Peter Feldmann and William Kentridge, who locatetheir most crucial images in the cave. Movable, agile images dance on the wall,darker than the half-darkness of the cave in which they appear. In the following,I will first discuss the manifold meanings and elusiveness of the shadow in theirœuvre. This lays the ground for explicating the comforting quality of the shadow inthe light of Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology. Blumenberg’s interestin the human need for consolation and his theory about the birth of metaphor inthe cave will be instrumental for teasing out what makes for comfort in art.

AB - One of the key dimensions of comfort is ‘consolation’. It is through the sharingof stories that we console each other. The art of comforting hence is the art ofstorytelling.As an art historian,I am interested in how consoling narratives unfoldin visual art, or, more specifically, in what I call ‘shadow works’ in contemporaryart. This genre evolved from analogue shadow theatres with their long tradition inChina, India, Greece, and Turkey, including modern versions like Henri Rivière’sshadow plays for the Cabaret Chat Noir or similar contemporary installations.Eversince Lotte Reiniger’s early shadow films, the tradition can also be found in filmicordigitalanimations–allofwhichconjureuptheplayoflightandshadowwithinacave (Reiniger 1970,1979).The shadow is a complex figure,which,as I will show,notonly serves as a model for metaphor but also as a source of comfort on the creativeside and on the receiving side. This can be seen especially well in the works bythe contemporary artists Hans-Peter Feldmann and William Kentridge, who locatetheir most crucial images in the cave. Movable, agile images dance on the wall,darker than the half-darkness of the cave in which they appear. In the following,I will first discuss the manifold meanings and elusiveness of the shadow in theirœuvre. This lays the ground for explicating the comforting quality of the shadow inthe light of Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology. Blumenberg’s interestin the human need for consolation and his theory about the birth of metaphor inthe cave will be instrumental for teasing out what makes for comfort in art.

KW - Science of art

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=105004618740&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.14361/9783839449028-005

DO - 10.14361/9783839449028-005

M3 - Chapter

AN - SCOPUS:105004618740

SN - 9783837649024

T3 - Culture Theory

SP - 85

EP - 100

BT - Comfort in Contemporary Culture

A2 - Birke, Dorothee

A2 - Butter, Stella

PB - transcript Verlag

CY - Bielefeld

ER -