Aesthetic Investigations (E-Journal, Dutch Association of Aesthetics)
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From mistake to event: Poor images for transforming the everyday of displacement
Full text linkThis Arts & Artists contribution addresses the concept of `poor image\u27, coined by the German artist Hito Steyerl. I intend to link it with the development of artistic practices based on the use of ordinary materials and images, which are not created with the pretensions of becoming artworks but as a result of a social context. For this, I will delve into the ability to speculate with alternative scenarios in the work of authors such as Jon Mikel Euba or Erlea Maneros Zabala, but I will also review my own activity as an artist. In fact, more than simply describing the use of poor images, I propose to relate them to a situation of displacement: my own, living in Sweden but researching the minoritization of Galician culture in Spain
Part of the people or apart from the people? A critical note on the liberal feminism of Barbie (2023)
Full text linkBarbie (2023) is both a feminist and a metaphysical film. It is a story of ideas regarding girls and their fantasies and the relation of the two vis-à-vis each other. This critical note draws attention to a way in which the film\u27s metaphysics gets in the way of its feminism. I will argue that the film\u27s conception of Barbie Land and the Real World, as discrete planes of existence, is itself a symptom of the alienated state of existence that Barbie aims to overcome. Consequently, Barbie\u27s escape from this alienated state is doomed to fail from the start
Review of Gualeni and Fassone’s Fictional Games: A Philosophy of Worldbuilding and Imaginary Play (2022), London: Bloomsbury Publishing
No full textA Modal Ontology of Imagination: New conversations in neo-Kantian and everyday aesthetics
Full text linkEveryday aesthetics has been accused of being ontologically and systematically juvenile for a variety of reasons, such as the rejection of some major claims of Kantian aesthetics, its relative newness, its disparate methodologies, and the theoretical and ethical difficulties of outlining a systematic apparatus without reimposing rationalist and colonial perspectives. While it is untrue that everyday aesthetics as a new sub-discipline lacks systematic rigour, another ontology of the everyday will be introduced here. Calvin Seerveld’s aesthetic theory will be outlined and then offered as a resource for understanding the constitutive role imagination plays in analytical and other kinds of thinking. His notion of ‘allusivity’ as the common quality of all aesthetic expression suggests that art, craft, design, and everyday aesthetic appreciation all emerge from the same subjective function of imaginative ‘nuance’. Additionally, his thought comes from within an established tradition of modal ontology begun by 20th century Dutch Continental philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd
Barbie is not Born, but Rather Becomes, Barbie
Full text linkI begin this paper by identifying several criticisms of the film Barbie (2023), several of which have been proposed as reasons to deny its feminist content. I then circle back to what I consider the film\u27s most coherent theme, which exemplifies Simone de Beauvoir\u27s best-known quote, `One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.\u27 This claim emphasises that what it is to be a woman is not biological, but social. That is, who we become is influenced by external factors such as family upbringing, available role models, class expectations, and our freedom to navigate our choices. A post-script relates the theme of this film to the current political situation in the U.S., after the re-election of Donald Trump
Private Vocabulary, Public Resonance: On Miyazaki\u27s The Boy and the Heron
Full text linkThe latest film by Hiyao Miyazaki, The Boy and the Heron, unfolds in unexpected and occasionally baffling ways. The film’s second half, especially, takes place in a world that appears to abide by a distinct narrative logic than that which viewers are familiar with. I discuss this as an instance of Miyazaki creating and working within a private, authentic vocabulary, as has been described in Existentialist and Pragmatist traditions. Specifically, I analyze its filmic language as an alloy of the memories, imagined possibilities, and losses of two of its characters, and why this depiction is so affecting
What (if any) aesthetics of everyday experience should we have?
Full text linkIn this paper, I will show that an aesthetics of everyday experience independent of our analyses of art is absolutely essential. While the aims of discourse about art may be normative, the aims of discourse about everyday aesthetic experience are very different --- such discourse has, in part, epistemic goals, and, to the extent that it has a normative goal, such a goal is not agreement about the judgments of such experiences but about how disparate judgments can both find place in the shared aesthetic space. In other words, discourse about quotidian aesthetic experience is meta-aesthetic in character
Review of Vid Simoniti, Artists Remake the World: A Contemporary Manifesto (2023), New Haven: Yale University Press
Full text linkWith Artists Remake the World: A Contemporary Manifesto (2023), Vid Simoniti surveys recent exhibition-based contemporary art (most since 2016) that ‘glimpse possibilities for repairing the world’. By deferring to institutional definitions of art, Simoniti avoids having to defend whether exhibited objects are art, yet this approach ignores the fact that not all exhibited objects begin/endure as art, let alone begin/endure as political art. Early on, he admits of a paradox regarding exhibition-based political art, that is, it can feel ‘forbiddingly abstruse, experimental, hard to access, inward looking, even elitist’.
Simoniti’s introduction describes his aim to demonstrate how ‘through art, we momentarily remake the world as we know it’. He develops this argument over seven chapters beginning with ‘when and how art contemporary art became political’, then ‘Realism for our time: on art and truth’, ‘unity and utopia: on socially engaged art’, ‘worldmaking: on the role of aesthetics in political art’, ‘spectacle and surveillance: on art in the internet age’, ‘creativity in the face of extinction: on art and climate change’, and finally ‘remaking the world’s hinges’
