by Dr. Christoph Kluetsch

Tuesday 3 December 2024 at 5pm

Auro Artworld is organizing a series of 6 lectures at the Centre d’Art multimedia room in Auroville. These lectures, conducted by Dr. Christoph Kluetsch, will explore connections between art, philosophy, and spirituality, bridging Eastern and Western traditions to illuminate the enduring questions of existence, consciousness, and creativity. The series will be offered on the first Tuesday of every month.

Retinal Art and the Ruins of Representation: Revisiting Plato’s Cave and the Notion of Rasa in the Natyashastra – an Indo-European Perspective
A. Coomaraswamy and Marcel Duchamp criticized the West for producing ‘only’ retinal art. When we look at an object, an image is produced on the retina, which connects to the brain and sensation. That image can be represented through art and its transformative power. While Western art gradually moved toward abstraction and a disconnection from the object, in the Natyashastra, the notion of rasa (taste) always referred to the expression of the inner world and a connectivity based on shared inner sensation of rasa. This contrast can be illuminated through Plato’s cave allegory.

Future Lectures
Tue Jan 7th 2025 – Who is Seeing When Seeing: The Kena Upanishad and the Sensation of Logic
Tue Feb 4th 2025 – Film is Thought: H. Bergson’s Cinematograph and How J. L. Godard Shocks the Viewer into Reality
Tue Mar 4th 2025 – Reading Deleuze in India: Plane of Immanence, Rhizome, Brahman, and Conversations with AI