The enemies of wonder: an itinerant conversation
Dettmers, Silke and Sanderson, Mark (2016) The enemies of wonder: an itinerant conversation. In: Wonder in Contemporary Artistic Practice. Routledge. ISBN 9781138855816
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What constitutes ‘Wonder’ and what stands in the way of it? The more Sanderson and Dettmers explore this mental place, the more the territory expands around them. What kind of a thing is being studied here? An event? A frame of mind? A spiritual quest? A commonplace? The questions begin to pile up: does Wonder actually mean different things for different people? Is it little more than a rhetoric around curiosity and creativity or are we in the presence of something more complex and even mysterious, such as a singular response that is not governed by familiarity, however briefly? Wonder has already been out there under different names and aesthetic experiences, from the ‘scientific’ curiosity inspired by the Wunderkammer to the sublime of Burke and Kant, Romanticism, the ‘metaphysical’ revelations of pittura metafisica, to surrealism’s ‘marvellous’ and even Warhol’s ‘pop’. All display similarities and all involve states of dislocation and intensity, along with momentarily heightened attitudes to the world. Clearly, Wonder has become something of a trope, with the Wunderkammern increasingly used by artists as a curatorial solution. The point then is to explore the contemporary usage of Wonder, and how and what it now signifies.
The chapter attempts to provide a new approach by exploring Wonder in the form of a written dialogue between someone from an arts background and someone from a theory background, where numerous ideas are exchanged in a form that is more exploratory and less academically conventional. ‘The Enemies of Wonder’ sets about investigating some assumptions and constituents of Wonder, as well as the ways in which the ‘spectacle’ has colonized it and appropriated it, thus passivising an experience not just of phenomena, but of the self in an active/creative state, as it responds to conditions of unfamiliarity in the world of things and ideas.
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