Stelarc and the Chimera

Abstract

Kant's Critique of Judgment remains a text that seems incapable of exhausting its futures.1 Since its hasty composition and publication in 1790 it has been used to theorize an extraordinary range of artistic practices ranging from romanticism to historicism, from the formalism of Expressionism to the sublime materiality of l'informe. In their turn each practice has transformed the theoretical text, bringing to the foreground aspects and turns of argument that previously were overlooked or excluded from consideration. The Critique has consequently become a locus of the very aesthetic reflective judgment that it theorized, one whose criteria of aesthetic judgment are themselves transformed in the event of judging a practice. Yet in spite of this history of constant transformation, the text remains enigmatic and still gives the sense of having barely been read.