Dr. Martin Mettin
Former Associate Member
Configurations of the sensual. Material and practice in contemporary art and aesthetics
What is material in contemporary art? How is it shaped and formed through the practice of artistic work? The proposed projected applies a philosophical perspective to an exploration of these questions. The starting point is the basic assumption that in aesthetics, material and practice should take priority over theory. Consequently, my approach focuses on individual artistic works (in music, painting and photography) rather than on current discourses about aesthetics. By means of models, the sensual, spatial and temporal structures of the material of contemporary art become the object of philosophical investigation. It is necessary to proceed from tangible works of art because, despite an ambitious conceptual and reflexive program, a clear void remains in current philosophical-aesthetic debates: Too little attention is paid to the actual artistic phenomena. Abstract philosophical theorems lose their connection to material objects by hardly, if at all, addressing individual works of art. With its orientation toward individual works, my project proceeds in the opposite direction.
About
Martin Mettin studied philosophy, social sciences and law in Leipzig and completed his master's degree in philosophy at the Free University of Berlin in 2013. From 2014 to 2019, he was a research assistant at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, where he completed his doctorate in 2019 with a dissertation on the Critical Theory of Listening in the work of Ulrich Sonnemann.
