Peter Borum

The teaching of art theory is currently subject-based (featuring topics such as ‘Visuality’ or ‘Time’). To cover different aspects of the chosen topics, we read small clusters of texts or text excerpts, which may in principle be of any kind. And we look at pictures. The important thing is, on the one hand, to try to reach the point where the theoretical impetus suddenly allows you to connect the issue with an artistic problem – and, on the other hand, turning away from art for a moment, to uncover the horizon within which artistic practices take place: societal structures, power relations, semiotics, biophysical reality and ‘humanity itself’ (as [tick all that apply] sensing things, thinking animals, bodies with urges, sexual beings, subjects of agency, communal creatures). In both respects, we need to reach beyond a modern European context.

Within the field of theory, I myself work with the basic relationship between recognisability and untranslatability in the work of art. My starting point is the idea that structure as form has a recognisable side that can be perceived perceptually (cognitively), while the individual (singular) character of the individual entity is by definition untranslatable. I locate this untranslatability in the realms of the sensuous (= the aesthetic), meaning that I seek neither to attribute the aesthetic to the subject alone or to art alone. This also means that I try to consider both the historical category known as ‘fine arts’ and the philosophical discipline of ‘aesthetics’ as moments within human practice as a whole.

Most recently, I have worked with the relationship between plant growth and sculptural expression and with the relationship between the archaic and modernism seen from a technological perspective (aesthetics as a technique in the absence of a firm concept of art). In addition, I do translations (including art theory) and am a part-time lecturer teaching French language and culture at the University of Copenhagen, where I have also participated in a research project on recent French literary history.