Bazon Brock

Bildersturm und stramme Haltung (Iconoclasm and Standing at Attention)
Texts 1968 to 1996
VOLUME 155

The Aesthetic Program of a Generalist

Bazon Brock’s thinking and writing champions the preservation of modernism’s momentum in postmodern times, perplexing situations, and deconstructed spaces. Here, modernism is conceived in its truest sense as a radical rejection of traditional roots without any functional value. Most of all, this means bidding farewell to the supposed dignity of art as an unassailable category of theological transcendence, or at least venerated sublimity. But it also encompasses the integration of every aesthetic object into writing, no matter how banal or everyday it might be. Already the distinction between those last two terms—that the banal is not necessarily everyday and the everyday certainly isn’t banal—operates like a perpetual motion engine within Brock’s thought.

Bazon Brock (b. Stolp, Pomerania, now Poland, 1936; lives and works in Berlin and Wuppertal) is professor emeritus of aesthetics and cultural education at the University of Wuppertal. He also held professorships at the University of Fine Arts (HFBK) Hamburg (1965–1976) and the University of Applied Arts Vienna (1977–1980). Both as a theorist and an artist, he contributed substantially to the rise of Pop Art and the Happening in Germany, organized numerous exhibitions, and published widely on art, design, everyday culture, and aesthetics.

With an epilogue by the photographer and author Rolf Sachsse (b. 1949 in Bonn).