Johannes Bauer (philosopher)

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Johannes Bauer (* 1950 in Munich ) is a German philosopher , musicologist and painter .

biography

Johannes Bauer during the lecture How abstract is abstract painting? (Berlin 2017)

Bauer studied philosophy, musicology, art history, Byzantine studies and classical archeology in Munich, Zurich, Vienna, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin; The doctorate took place at the Philosophy Department of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main with a dissertation on the reflective spectrum of German idealism , especially Hegel , and its effect on the strategy and rhetoric models in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony . This was followed by publications on Kant, Goethe, Adorno and Cage . He also wrote essays and radio essays on diagnostic, media-theoretical and music- aesthetic topics as well as on the philosophical analysis of new music . Since 2006 he has been increasingly active as an artist and deliberately outside of the art business as a painter. Bauer lives - after years as a freelance author in Berlin - currently in Süderlügum near the Danish border.

Philosophy and aesthetics

Bauer's philosophical work is about the potential of the possible under the reality requirement of the real: about the resistance of the unavailable - against the expulsion of the apparently useless through technical exploitation offensives; about the resource of creative imagination - against the leveling of the creative imagination in a world of speed-trained perception and functional patterns; finally about the proper time of thinking - against the practical obsession with work efficiency and return. Bauer understands his marginal walks in the area of ​​logic and meaning and thus of meaning and non-meaning as a contribution to an aesthetically founded philosophy of modernity, inspired by numerous composition and reflection practices in contemporary music and painting.

The philosophical skepticism about the meaningfulness of the term already determines Bauer's work on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. By confronting their “musical formulations with an abundance of philosophical-literary formulations by Beethoven's contemporaries”, the substance of which also formed the basis of the composer's musical thinking, Bauer attempts a “masterful methodological tour de force” between the to analyze musical and conceptual thinking without confusing the philosophical argument with the depth of the music. Bauer reads “musical facts as philosophical” and exemplifies “philosophical musical”; and this with a coherence with which the Ninth Symphony, as Peter Gülke observes, is "understood as an 'active philosophy'" in a way that has not been achieved before. “Like Adorno's Beethoven notes, which appeared a little later, Bauer’s investigations show what was done by the 'left'” for an “adequate understanding of Beethoven and will continue to do so.”

Johannes Bauer, ATMEN ( speaking score for the ensemble “Die Maulwerker” for Beethoven's Cavatina and Heinz Holliger's First String Quartet ), world premiere: Berlin 2008 [excerpt].

The fact that language in the digital age is increasingly understood as pure language of use prevents insight into its limits and thus into the limits of a discourse whose interlocking of syntax, logic and judgment revolves more and more around the truthfulness of mere information. When everything has to pay off, language is ultimately transformed into a restless machine of judgment that loses the awareness of far less formalized speech. Bauer by no means wants everyday language to be replaced by experimental language games, but rather to make people aware of the deficits and exclusion procedures of the language of use by means of their transgressions. Only when a language that is fundamentally based on the logic of propositional sentences is exceeded does one become aware of its meaning as a barrier to any other order of language and writing. What escapes the usual acts of speaking and writing due to the alliance of grammar, logic and truth, for Bauer, in return, means that precisely this alliance regulates what is perceived and not perceived, what can and cannot be thought. It is only when a text logic is broken up that brings sequence and consequence, sequence and consistency into alignment that writing and language become permeable to the reverse of their familiar texture in the weaving and knotting of traces of meaning. What can be said, what cannot be said, what can be read, what cannot be read: where is the line? And how far can the syntax be deregulated without slipping into the irrelevant arbitrary?

In the interplay between philosophy and poetry, Bauer's examination of “Goethe's musical thinking” is devoted to “music as a poetological model for a L'art-pour-l'art poetics avant la lettre”. “Following Adorno's dictum, based on Goethe's' Classicism ', of a' non-violent 'speech in which the' cramp of the word 'is released, Bauer outlines a playful poetics of Goethe that deliberately creates ambiguities and thus presents itself as a criticism of that' addiction to identification Judgment 'with its' two-valued logic of right and wrong'. ”“ From this perspective, Goethe's suspicion of the 'occupation, occupation of the sentence' postulated by Bauer appears “as an“ early form of alterity poetics ”And“ illuminates ”an“ important facet in Goethe's poetology ”. (The spoken score ATMEN , which was premiered by Ensemble Maulwerker in Berlin in 2008 , shows how Bauer himself staged a transformation of the syntactic causal logic .)

Bauer's work is indebted to Heidegger's critique of metaphysics insofar as his hermeneutics of language between closing the world and opening up the world makes the transition from the discourse of reasons of philosophy to the discourse of events in thinking, from the causal-logical sealing of language to an ambiguously open emergence of its structure of meaning and its sometimes subject-remote expansion. According to Bauer, this transition is exactly comparable to the change that is decisive for painting and music of the late modern era with its departure from the model of representation and organism. Parallels between Heidegger's critique of the experience and numerous compositions of new music that elude the narcissistic mirror function of hearing are obvious. The fact that this departure from an aesthetic of empathy points a way into the open for Heidegger - beyond the subject-centered repertoire of ideas of Western humanism - speaks with Bauer for the explosiveness of a philosophy, its thoughts on the experience of serenity, emptiness, time and death as well corresponds to a fundamental intention of painting and music of the late 20th century: namely the intention to expose the work of art to the transcendent traces of existence in its frailty, not infrequently until the material and thus aesthetic consistency is dissolved.

Conversely, to what extent the misunderstanding of contemporary artistic reflection processes can affect the cognitive faculties of philosophy, Bauer analyzes in particular in the examination of Adorno's music philosophy. Bauer addresses the problem “that Adorno refused to accept certain tendencies in the latest music of his time - precisely because he deeply mistrusted the alienation of the subject in them and, in anarchic (John Cage) or 'memoryless' concepts ( Morton Feldman ), surrendered suspected the existing. Here Bauer sees the musician Adorno blocked by the philosopher. " The fact that, after saying goodbye to the metaphysically legitimized claim to truth of language and under the influence of aesthetic concepts of language transformation, the philosophical work also begins to doubt its logical dogma of stringency, is proven by the mutual permeability of the discourses: from philosophy to the arts to the natural sciences.

painting

© Johannes Bauer, Odyssee, Nekyia (2017) , 38.6 × 49.1 cm, acrylic on paper.jpg

In contrast to the mass marketing of images and information-fixated visual and meaning offers, Bauer's painting is not about further images, but about the image as an aesthetic event that opens the view and its horizon of knowledge beyond the norm of photographic visualization patterns. What is real Where are the limits of the visible? What remains abstract in spite of all the vividness and what makes the supposedly non-objective and abstract so explosive compared to the often too smooth surface of portrayals? From this perspective, Bauer seeks other ways of seeing and thinking by withdrawing the tangible and concrete. Away from the usual routes of perception and explanatory routines, Bauer's painting invites you to venture into the unknown in an unpredictable moment and in the border area between the recognizable and the puzzling, irritating, illuminating, liberating, and adventurous. In addition to topics such as “metamorphosis” or “entropy”, the focus of Bauer's artistic work is also monochromatic experiments and text textures as uncertainty and at the same time as the temptation of a need for visual security that is still geared towards the unambiguous identification of what is depicted.

The fact that Bauer's last works - especially those of the Homo-sapiens - and the Iliad cycle - incorporate representational figurations can only be seen to a limited extent as a departure from the abstinence from depiction, especially since the stenciled design of these cycles always alternates between depiction and abstraction. The stencil as a manifestation of archaic traces of expression in the Homo sapiens cycle also refuses to be an art of empathy, while in the Iliad cycle, modeling through the stencil leads to structures that almost dissolve the depiction of the subject.

Works on philosophy and aesthetics (selection)

  • Rhetoric of transgression. Annotations to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (= musicological studies, ed. By Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, vol. 8, 1992) , ISBN 978-3-89085-260-7 .
  • Sovereign and subject. Kant's ethics and some consequences, in: traces No. 34/35 (X / XI / XII 1990) , ISSN  0176-7240 .
  • In the face of the Sphinx. Subject and system in Adorno's musical aesthetics, in: Gerhard Schweppenhäuser (ed.), Sociology in late capitalism. On social theory Theodor W. Adornos, Darmstadt 1995, ISBN 3-534-12309-3 .
  • Seismograms of a non-subjective language. Écriture and ethos in Adorno's theory of the musical avant-garde, in: Gerhard Schweppenhäuser, Mirko Wischke (eds.), Impulse and Negativity. Ethics and Aesthetics at Adorno, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-88619-229-6 .
  • Telesupervision. Marginalia on the media world, in: Journal for Critical Theory (III 1996) ( online ), ISBN 3-924245-56-8 .
  • Theodor W. Adorno: Beethoven. Philosophy of Music, in: Journal for Critical Theory, No. 3 ( online ), ISBN 3-924245-56-8 .
  • Cage and tradition, in: Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (ed.), Mythos Cage, Hofheim 1999, ISBN 3-923997-87-6 .
  • METALANGUAGEATEM. On the pneumatic form of New Music, in: Dissonance No. 69 (VI 2001) ISSN 1660-7244
  • “Always present”. Time structure and time experience in new music, in: Positions. Contributions to New Music, Issue 50 (II 2002) ISSN 0941-4711
  • The silence and the white. John Cages 4´33, in: Positions. Contributions to New Music, Issue 52 (VIII 2002) ISSN 0941-4711
  • Denotations - detonations. Sensorium Neue Musik, in: Positions. Contributions to New Music, Issue 53 (XI 2002) ISSN 0941-4711
  • “Paths paved in the same way on all sides”. Goethe's musical thinking, in: Andreas Ballstaedt, Ulrike Kienzle, Adolf Nowak (eds.), Music in Goethe's work. Goethe's work in music, Schliengen 2003, ISBN 3-931264-22-X .
  • The public and the private. Revaluation processes in the modern age, in: Positions. Contributions to New Music, Issue 57 (XI 2003) ISSN 0941-4711
  • Traduttore traditore? Transfer, transform, design, in: Sabine Sanio, Christian Scheib (eds.), Transfer - Transfer - Metaphor. Cultural techniques, their visions and obsessions, Bielefeld 2004, ISBN 3-936646-88-0 .
  • Spells of Disenchantment. The beautiful, the true and the discourse of new music, in: Positions. Contributions to New Music, Issue 64 (IX 2005) ISSN 0941-4711
  • Text and texture. How much convention can new music tolerate ?, in: Dissonance No. 91 (IX 2005) ISSN 1660-7244
  • And Troy is still on fire. Work on the myth in Liza Lim's The Oresteia, in: Dissonance No. 97 (III 2007) ISSN 1660-7244
  • The silence of the sirens. Adorno's Aesthetics and the New in New Music, in: Adolf Nowak and Markus Fahlbusch (eds.), Musical Analysis and Critical Theory. On Adorno's philosophy of music, Tutzing 2007 (= Frankfurt contributions to musicology. Ed. V. Adolf Nowak; vol. 33), ISBN 978-3-7952-1237-7 .
  • Exhaustion. Time decay as an attitude towards life, in: Positions. Contributions to New Music, Issue 75 (VI 2008) ISSN 0941-4711
  • Threads, nets, fabrics. Linear in New Music , in: Program book of the Witten Days for New Chamber Music 2008
  • Risk freedom. On hearing and overhearing new music, in: “musica viva” program book, Munich 2009
  • In the center of a pristine desert. Helmut Lachenmann and the human condition, in: Positions. Contributions to New Music, Issue 80 (VIII 2009) ISSN 0941-4711
  • More than a shadow discourse? New music and the phantom of postmodernism. [Salzburg Mozarteum Symposium and Lecture Series 2006/07 on the topic of "Musical Postmodernism"
  • Margins. On the philosophy of the periphery and marginal, in: Gisela Nauck (ed.)… On the edges of measure… The composer Gerald Eckert [Wolke-Verlag, Hofheim 2013],  ISBN 978-3-936000-61-0 .
  • Atmen (an experimental speaking score for the ensemble “Die Maulwerker” for Beethoven's Cavatina and Heinz Holliger's First String Quartet), world premiere: Berlin 2008; Program book of the Berlin Society for New Music 2008 .

Painting (selection)

Cycles:

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Johannes Bauer: Rhetoric of Exceeding. Annotations to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony . In: Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Ed.): Musicological studies . tape 8 . Centaurus Verlagsgesellschaft, Pfaffenweiler 1992, ISBN 978-3-89085-260-7 ( d-nb.info ).
  2. ↑ Johannes Bauer: margins. On the philosophy of the peripheral and marginal . In: Gisela Nauck (Ed.): … On the edges of measure… The composer Gerald Eckert . Wolke-Verlag, Hofheim 2013, ISBN 978-3-936000-61-0 ( d-nb.info ).
  3. ↑ Georg Knepler: Music Theory . In: Annette Kreutziger-Herr, Theory of Music: Analysis and Interpretation (Hrsg.): Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft . tape 13 , 1995, ISBN 978-3-89007-308-8 ( d-nb.info ).
  4. ↑ Peter Gülke: Crossing borders . In: Musica . No. 3 . Bärenreiter, 1996, ISSN  0027-4518 , p. 220 f .
  5. ↑ Johannes Bauer: Text and Texture . In: dissonance . No. 91 , 2005, p. 4 ff. - On the controversy about delinearising the linear cf. also Stefan Drees: Plea for the text as a linear discourse. On the essay "Text and Texture" by Johannes Bauer. In: Dissonanz / Dissonance No. 92 , 2005, pp. 39–40.
  6. ↑ Stefan Börnchen: Basso continuo with parallel fifths. New songs and old ways on the subject of "Goethe and Music" . December 11, 2006 ( iaslonline.de ).
  7. ↑ Johannes Bauer: The monstrosity and the serenity. Martin Heidegger's closeness to new music . SWR essay, 2010 ( johannes-bauer-philosophie.com ).
  8. ↑ Johannes Bauer: Cage and the tradition . In: Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (ed.): Mythos Cage . Wolke Verlagsgesellschaft, Hofheim 1999, ISBN 3-923997-87-6 , p. 92 ff . ( d-nb.info ).
  9. ↑ Johannes Bauer: The Silence of the Sirens, Adorno's Aesthetics and the New in New Music . In: Markus Fahlbusch / Adolf Nowak (eds.): Musical analysis and critical theory. On Adorno's philosophy of music . Hans Schneider, Tutzing 2007, ISBN 978-3-7952-1237-7 , pp. 303-324 ( d-nb.info ).
  10. ↑ Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich: Forgotten Adorno. A Frankfurt congress of international musicologists . In: Frankfurter Rundschau . October 1, 2003.
  11. ^ Johannes Bauer: New Music and Natural Science. In: www.johannes-bauer-philosophie.com. Retrieved on March 25, 2020 (German).
personal data
SURNAME Bauer, Johannes
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philosopher, musicologist and painter
DATE OF BIRTH 1950
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich