Mimesis im Kontext der Grenzüberschreitung im Kunstdiskurs des Modernismus

Abstract

Up to the mid-nineteenth century, an attitude towards μίμησις changed noticeably in all artistic discourses. This is one of the reasons why sociologists and philosophers as well as (to even a higher degree) general opinion often attribute a decline of imitation or representation to the art of the twentieth century. The article distances from such a generalization. If the ‘mimetic’ stands for a tendency of art to deceive senses of the audience with different techniques in order to articulate a non-artistic phenomenon, we have to note that modernism in arts did not eo ipso produce a general hostility towards μίμησις. Rather, the aspect of (non)representation was the one that was most affected by the subversive practices of artistic modernism. In literature and visual arts (that were traditionally rather mimetic) the mimetic component was indeed diminished in modernism, whilst in music (that has traditionally already been “abstract”) it was in fact modernism that let it be characterized by a high degree of mimetic criteria.