Intense Singularities: Dieter Roth's and Henning Christiansen's Processual Aesthetics

This thesis examines the potential flux and indeterminacy within an aesthetic experience, with a particular focus on the works of Dieter Roth and Henning Christiansen. This study looks at the desires, forces, and energies that are at work in the aesthetic experience, and further, aims to evoke the nature of the intensities that are generated through each interaction. Informed by Jean-Francois Lyotard and Julia Kristeva, this research shifts the perspective from a fixed systematic approach that is concerned with the works objective qualities, inherent essence, or material properties, to a processual approach that works through the nuances, ambiguities, and energies that constitute arts vitality. Applying Lyotards libidinal aesthetics to works of art whose materiality is transitory adds further complexity to an understanding of the energies and forces that are at work in an aesthetic experience, initiating a theory of perpetual flux, fragmentation, and singular intensities.