10.6.2025, Dienstag 19:00 Uhr
Fantasies of the People. Our Rededication
Ort:
- Raum 229, Hörsaal der HFBK Hamburg
When the writer Lu Märten in 1921 pronounced the “Fantasies of the people”, she added that “historically there were never any others”. To Märten, fantasy was a communal faculty, a shared imagination, that had found itself reduced, trivialized into folkic belief and aestheticized into literary genre throughout the 19th century. Fantasies (of the people) came to be painted as primitive or delusional, and it wouldn’t be long until they were nationally colored in this role. Fantasy’s young contender, imagination, proposed as an individual and individuating capacity, had itself only gained traction a good hundred years earlier against fantasy’s “immeasurable field of horrors” (Jean Paul): in the Romantic moment, in the Romantic subject, for which Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings became (unfairly) emblematic
In our own times this rift between fantasy and imagination has been coming into ever more sharp relief. In recent years artists working from the fantasies of their people have (re)fueled necessary discussions on contemporary art’s provincialisms, and cultural theorists demanding radical imagination have stretched this faculty’s reach far beyond the national confinements of its modern scope.
Today’s art appears to be full of genuinely fantastic imagination. The Romantic division between fantasy and imagination now lays bare the original assumptions it once concealed, displaying its historical partisans and their intellectual assets and the Romantic order of the senses finds itself in a state of conspicuous destitution. I have no vested interest to pursue its unrelenting critique, art history’s repetition in the negative once more. Instead what I want to propose is a work of rededication. The rededication of us, Romantic subjects, to some Fantasies of the People.
Kerstin Stakemeier is an educator and writer teaching at the Academy of Arts in Nürnberg and Maumaus ISP Lisbon. With Anselm Franke she curated Illiberal Arts (Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, ‘21) and Illiberal Lifes (Ludwigforum Aachen '23), with Bill Dietz she authored Universal Receptivity (‘21), with Marina Vishmidt Reproducing Autonomy (‘16). Her monograph Entgrenzter Formalismus. Verfahren einer antimodernen Ästhetik (‘17) came out with bbooks. Stakemeier has a.o. published in Artforum, October, Art Monthly, Texte zur Kunst, Kunst und Politik and recently in Mousse Magazine, Berliner Review and Cura. She works with Devin Fore on the “Fantasies of the People. Historically there were never any others”, a conference at Princeton University (03/’25) to be published as a book (’26) and to be continued.