Aesthetic Investigations (E-Journal, Dutch Association of Aesthetics)
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Thomas Crow, The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge (2023)
Full text linkThomas Crow’s book The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge reappraises West Coast art as enmeshed in the counterculture. The first five of its twelve chapters discuss Bruce Conner’s development as a multimedia artist in San Franscisco and Los Angeles producing assemblages, films, drawings, magazine illustrations, and light shows for rock concerts. The next five chapters expand Crow’s argument by appraising anti-war manifestations, Black and Latino protest work, Land Art, and West Coast conceptual practices as aspects of the counterculture. Moving forward to the late 1970s, the final two chapters review first Conner’s reemergence as a photographer documenting California punk bands and then Mike Kelley’s transplanting of Detroit’s alternative rock idealism to fuel the development of his own radical art practices
Beyond Autonomy and Activism:: ‘Poetic Understanding’ as a Ground for Political Community
Full text linkThis paper takes the particular case of poetry to chart a middle route between the extremes of the autonomist and activist dimensions of understanding aesthetic politics. I argue that the politicality of poetry lies neither in the politics of the author or the text (activist), nor in their removedness vis-à-vis concrete political situations (autonomist). Instead, politicality needs to be located in the intersubjective dynamic between readers and poems or works of art more broadly. I propose an intersubjective pragmatist framework of interpretation, which takes the actualization of a decolonial and anti-identitarian political plurality as the basis of poetry’s politicality. I develop the framework by bringing together three conceptual frameworks: Hannah Arendt’s theory of political plurality, Édouard Glissant’s concepts of relation and opacity, and John Dewey’s pragmatist theory of aesthetic experience. At its core is the concept of ‘poetic understanding’, a transformative quality of understanding that facilitates between the reader and the text a dynamic and contingent process of mutual transformation and constitution. I explore the potential of such understanding as a ground for political community
Arts and Politics: What Has Ontology to Do With It ?
No full textIntroduction to the issue Arts, Ontology and Politics. This text gives a survey of the articles included in the special issue Arts, Ontology and Politics and of the challenges that these articles have to deal with in approaching the central them
Growing Up with Mies and Saarinen
Full text linkPaul Guyer interviews his cousin Laure van Heijenoort, who as a teenager lived for several years with her parents in one of Mies van der Rohe\u27s Lafayette Park townhouses in Detroit and attended school at Eliel Saarinen\u27s Cranbrook campus. She reports on her experiences of living and study in both, experiences still vivid to her and now to a broader audience
Dissolved Politics and Artistic Imagination. On Kristeva\u27s Revolution and Revolt
No full textIn her work, Julia Kristeva uses two disparate concepts: revolution and revolt. In this article we will try to outline these concepts as different approaches to the relations between power, art and psychoanalysis. By placing the concepts of revolt and revolution in dialogue with each other, and by pointing out that the dialogue departs from the notion of experience, we will attempt to reconstruct the important contribution that Kristeva\u27s work offers. Her perspective reveals that artistic expression is linked to a specific kind of politics (dissolved politics). Kristeva\u27s view of literary and psychoanalytic practice is then, we argue, something that can contribute to its realisation, albeit in a limited way
Taking up space: Architecture, Performance Art and the Ethos of Encounter
Full text linkOne of the many innovations with which performance art can be credited is its revolutionary approach to space-making and inhabitation. Its reanimation of objects, events and bodies takes up space as a material presence, which incidentally engenders a conceptual problem. Philosophical aesthetics has had a lot to say about our relationship with the built form, but this work has not been brought to bear on performance art and the ways this artform complicates such relationships. This paper addresses this void by exploring two dimensions of what architect Daniel Libeskind has called ‘the space of encounter’—the physical and the ethical
Empowered Amateur Posers
Full text linkAurélie Debaene cites a lack of aesthetics research on the professional art model, concluding that the artistic enterprise of collaboration or \u27partnering\u27 between model and artist can lead viewers to under-appreciate their conjoined creativity and skill. I argue for a collaborative model that extends the notion of art model beyond the professional to the amateur art model/poser/performer. On this model, an artist can achieve success in an artwork by: (1) posing their self in a self-portrait and/or (2) inviting viewers to pose in artworks designed to \u27partner\u27 together in creating an aesthetic experience of shared creativity, skill, and pleasure
Corrigendum: Manresa, "Feminist pedagogical / conversational performance art. The work of Monica Mayer", vol. 5, no. 1 (2022).
Full text link‘Used and Amused’: On Having Been a Real-Life Model, Muse, Performer, Poseur, and Sitter
Full text linkOn the occasion of this special issue focused on Models and Sitters, I am presenting what Dawn Kanter (in this issue) terms a \u27textual account of the sitter\u27. With this in mind, I revisit a particular era in my life (primarily 1993-1999) when I regularly served as a model, muse, performer, poseur, and sitter. In fact, there was sufficient material to organise \u27Used and Amused\u27 (2000), an exhibition focused on ten collaborations, for which I typically self-improvised. Rather than simply detail these events, I\u27ve woven various ideas developed by each of this special issue\u27s contributors into this article, so that my narrative here augments their papers
Democratising Conceptual Art: What about the Spectator?
Full text linkIn this paper I elaborate upon the elitist character of the mainstream theories on conceptual art. I show that the elitism is founded on wrong presumptions concerning the relation between artists and spectators. Working from the philosophy of Jacques Rancière, I reject the hierarchical structure present in the mainstream theories on conceptual art. Instead, I propose to take a ‘democratic turn’, as understood by Rancière. In such an outlook, the contribution of the spectator is revalued as equally active and creative as the contribution of the artist. The democratic turn has serious consequences for the theoretical foundation of conceptual art. We can no longer maintain that the conceptual work of art is solely the artist\u27s idea, nor that the material appearance is negligible. Furthermore, the democratic alternative opens up conceptual art for a broader audience, while the very core of its practice remains intact, namely that the idea behind it is essential. But it adds an important caveat: what the idea represents is more than what the artist initially had in mind