Building monuments that become the city's landmarks, where reality and symbol come together, is a characteristic of many early civilisations. The landmarks would stand for the monuments of these past societies, around which communities were formed and expressed in a symbolic language. Today, we are surrounded by mass produced objects; these are our modern debris of artefacts, creating a new material-symbolic language.
Kristine Stiles, "Schlaget Auf: The Problem with Carolee Schneemann's Painting", Carolee Schneemann, Up To And Including Her Limits, Dan Cameron (ed.), New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996, pp. 15-25.
Kristine Stiles, "The Painter as an Instrument of Real Time", Carolee Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects, Cambridge, MA, London: The MIT Press, 2002, pp. 3-16.
Although imbued with an element of interpretation in the approach required to understand, explain or express an aesthetic matter (Wiitgenstein, 1958: 202, 219; 1989-2009: 3, 6), Wittgenstein's descriptions of aesthetics as practical knowledge are closer to presenting forms of knowledge than the interpretative socio-anthropological and psychoanalytic practices. This is possibly why Wittgenstein (1974: 6.421, 71) equates aesthetics with ethics despite not adopting a definite position on whether knowledge is gained or presupposed in the aesthetic case.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philsophical Investigations, G.E.M. Anscombe (trans.), Oxford: Blackwell, 1958.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, D.F.Pears and B.F.McGuinness, London: Routledge, 1974.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Lectures on Aesthetics", C. Barrett (ed.), L. Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, London: Blackwell, 1989-2009, 1-37.