Everyday Aesthetics

Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, 2023

This article takes its point of departure from the second (embodied) linguistic turn represented by the enactivist notion of humans as linguistic bodies, using resources from Hans Georg Gadamer in order to propose a view of the relation between art and everyday experience as one of symbolic transformation. Conceiving art as a form of linguistic phenomenon wherein one can engage in original situations of communication, this view rejects both autonomist and direct continuity views of the art-everyday relation. We start by situating the idea of linguistic bodies within the enactive approach, spelling out relevant aspects concerning the significance of language for human life and perception (Sect. 2). Then we embark on a discussion of aspects of Shaun Gallagher's and Alva Noë's enactivist perspectives on art experience, highlighting places where their views align with and depart from ours (Sect. 3). The last two sections aim to lay out the transformative view in more detail, proposing a pluralistic understanding of art media and a view of art and art experience as modes of ideational, embodied thought (Sects. 4 and 5).

2019

Art viewers and critics talk as if visual artworks say things, express messages, or have meanings. For instance, Picasso's Guernica has been described as a "generic plea against the barbarity and terror of war", forming a "powerful anti-war statement". One way of understanding meaning in art is to draw analogies with language. My thesis explores how the notion of a speech actan utterance with a performative aspectcan illuminate art's power to 'speak'. In recent years, philosophers of art have explored speech act theory in relation to literary art, though barely at all in relation to visual art. Given the way we talk about painting, sculpture, installation, film, and photography, and given that artists have investigated performativity through their art, this neglect is surprising. My thesis develops two main arguments. First, artwork meaning is active. I argue that visual artworks, under certain conditions, are speech acts. They have propositional content, and they have a certain force: they can do things such as assert, protest, and criticisethings we would normally do with words. I defend these contested claims against several dissenters, and explore some consequences: in particular, I explore how art can lie, a hitherto neglected question. Second, artwork meaning is flexible. I argue that what an artwork says and does is affected by the context in which it's displayed, and in particular, by its curation. As a result, an artwork's content and force can vary from context to context. This goes against a dominant view in the philosophy of art-what I call 'Originalism'that the meaning of an artwork is fixed by factors which held at the time of the work's creation, and so cannot change across time. I argue that this is mistaken: artworks can change in meaning. Curatorial factors can affect an artwork's content and force, and consequently its social effects. It is known that our verbal speech has the power to oppress and liberate people in a society. My thesis aims to show that art also has this power to shape society; through what it says, and through what it does. iv v Declaration This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It is

The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics

Concepts of aesthetic relations are currently undergoing massive critique and potential reconfiguration. In some way or other, they all relate to the power structures vested in the aesthetic and its theoretical inheritance. In this contestation of the western canon, recent scholars have questioned basic aesthetic concepts like talent, disinterestedness, transparency, and universalist notions of the human by highlighting how such discourses are built upon and reinforce divisions of a racial and colonial nature. 1 Aesthetic relations, it seems, can no longer be confined to the classical relationship between an object and a subject. Neither can we solve the issue by a simple return to the broad understanding of aesthetics as aisthesis, as a general formula for sense perception, since such a conception still favors the singular experience of an autonomous self. The topic of this special volume of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics originated from a conference held at the University of Copenhagen in January 2021 hosted by the Art as Forum research center. The aim of the conference was not only to catch a glimpse of the status quo within artistic practices and aesthetic theory, but also to invite proposals for how new conceptualizations of relationality could be formulated in aesthetic, social, political, and historical contexts. Pivotal for the forms of these discussions was the setting they took place in: a worldwide lockdown due to an ongoing Covid-pandemic. While the health crisis exposed several structures of inequality in Denmark and many other places, it also coexisted with-or even revitalized-other significant movements across the globe. In 2020, the assassination of George Floyd led to a new surge of Black Lives Matters uprisings all over the world as well as global revolts against symbols of colonial heritage that assembled humans from near and far, high and low, and gave rise to wideranging debates over the role of aesthetics within social and political infrastructures and hierarchies. The simultaneity of revolts across the globe-from South Africa to Kalaallit Nunaatmade explicit how the lockdown had intensified our already growing dependency on digital infrastructures of communication. While the viral dissemination of slogans of anti-racism

Postgraduate Programme in Curating (ZHdK), 2014

During my time at the Postgraduate Programme in Curating at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), I had the great opportunity to work extensively on two projects by the socially-engaged Dutch artist, Jeanne van Heeswijk: the seventh installment of her Public Faculty series in Zurich (May 2013) and the closing conference for her long-term project, Freehouse, titled “Radicalizing the Local”, in Rotterdam (January 2014). I must admit that I began my involvement in socially-engaged art skeptically. And yet, through my involvement, my attitude began to transform, as only the more meaningful of engagements can do. This isn’t, however, a story of Skeptic-turned-Believer; it is rather a story of shifting focus: from the existential Is-This-Art? via the epistemological How-Is-This-Art? to the aesthetic What-Does-This-Art-Look-Like? This shift, however, is not a dismissal of the first two questions as irrelevant; I think they are indeed very relevant and interesting explorations. However, part of the shift of my focus is the acknowledgement of socially engaged art as a fait accompli in the domain of contemporary art. As such, the shift addresses one of the most prevalent critiques of socially-engaged art, its so-called dismissal of the aesthetic. It could be argued that the shift in conceptual and post-conceptual art was not so much a shift from materiality to immateriality, but rather a shift of aesthetic emphasis from the material to the immaterial. Most of these artworks remained very much material, whether in the person of the artist, the audience, or whatever is in between. And as such, the material remains often the infrastructure of how we encounter these works, and therefore still a large part of them. As in any genre, the aesthetics of the material infrastructure of this specific genre of post-conceptual art, namely socially-engaged art, was set in its early years by formative examples of it. I will therefore consider two such iconic examples, namely Democracy by Group Material and If You Lived Here by Martha Rosler. Both exhibitions took place at the Dia Art Foundation in New York in the late eighties. I contend that, despite the criticism that this genre devalues the aesthetic, the aesthetic choices made in it influenced much of its works for years, till our very day. Part of the interesting transformation of our day, however, is the proliferation of digital media and the influence that the virtual realm has had on issues of publicness. Accordingly, socially-engaged practices are transforming right along, some more embracing of the new media than others. As such, one of the questions that I hope to address in this study, as well, is how the aesthetics set by the early foundational projects of the genres translate in this transition. Thesis Dissertation Excerpt Master of Advanced Studies (MAS) Postgraduate Programme in Curating Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts (ICS) Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) Jury: • Dr. Dorothee Richter • Elke Krasny • Raphael Gygax May 31, 2014

Every piece of art affects the perceiving consciousness through images satisfying its aesthetic and cognitive needs. These images act as an intermediary through which a viewer moves from the real world of his own existence to the imaginary world of an artistic work. Different forms of art develop the artistic image through their own specific means-words, shape, motion, while a viewer perceives them by their senses-sight, hearing, and touch. Over the ages, art has always been engaged in fulfilling tasks of a pronounced social character whose implementation requires a proper sign system through which the artist reaches the viewer's mind. That is why for centuries the main goals set by artists themselves have been achieved by motifs borrowed from nature. However, since the age of Modernity, artists have been expertly using abstract means to imply their messages. The paper aims to-provide a brief review of the changes Modernity brings about in a social, economic and artistic sense i...

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2017

What is art? Why is it important? What does it tell us about ourselves? In Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, I try to answer these questions. Strange Tools builds on my previous work on perception and consciousness (No€ e 2004, 2009, 2012). The book has three animating ideas. First, art is not a technological practice; however, it presupposes such practices in something like the way that irony presuppose straight talk. Works of art are, as I put it, strange tools. Technology is not just something we use or apply to achieve a goal, although this is right to a first approximation; technologies organize our lives in ways that make it impossible to conceive of our lives in their absence; they make us what we are. Art, really, is an engagement with the ways in which our practices, techniques, and technologies, organize us and it is, finally, a way to understand that organization and, inevitably, to reorganize ourselves. The job of art, its true work, is philosophical. This is the second animating idea. Art is a philosophical practice. And philosophy-however surprising this may seem-is an artistic practice. This is because both art, and philosophy-superficially so different-are really species of a common genus whose preoccupation is with the ways we are organized and with the possibility of reorganizing ourselves. A third and final animating idea is that art and philosophy are practices, in the language of the book, bent on the invention of writing. In Strange Tools I criticize biological approaches to art, both neurobiological and evolutionary biological. But I also argue that art is tied to biology, for organization, central to the account I offer, is, at least in part, a biological notion. **** It is a striking fact about art that it is bound up with manufacture and craft. Artists make stuff; they make pictures, sculptures, performances, songs. Artists tinker and assemble, they build; they construct. But why? In contrast with mere technology, art doesn't have to work to be good. Indeed, when it comes to art, it is usually impossible to say, with any confidence, whether it works or not. And this because it is typically hard to say what it is even trying to do. This needn't be true. A portrait by the artist Leonardo da Vinci may aim at displaying a person's likeness. You can learn, for example, about the Duke's mistress from the

2021

In this Editor's column I discuss certain fruits and limits of applying the notion of 'performance' to works of art. Art works can be viewed as perfor- mances, the public furnishing of works' final form. Concerts can be viewed as performances of a work scored by someone else, the composer, but not all arts are double in this sense. Moreover, art can be viewed as mirroring the psychological, phenomenological and rhetorical aspects of human interaction, which exemplify the way people scrutinise moral situations. Not all performances are artistic, let alone art.

Drawing insights from sociology and philosophy, particularly the work of Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, this paper proposes a theory of art as a mode of communicative action which plays a vital role in the symbolic reproduction of social life. The focus is on autonomous art in the context of modern society. The analysis touches on art’s significance for individual identity formation; the interdependence of the intellectual, moral and aesthetic dimensions of culture; and the relation of moral consciousness to art which accounts for the historically specific societal significance of art, e.g., art and industry in first half of the 20th century, and art and ecology in the late 20th century. As a mode of communicative action, first, art assumes the outcome, but also marches ahead, of the process of socialisation, opening up and exploring new sensibilities and competencies. In so doing, it serves the formation of identity, displays individual competencies and a style of life practice, and contributes towards the maintenance of both culture and society by generating interpretations and motivating actions. Secondly, as regards cultural reproduction, art while basing itself on cultural resources, at the semantic dimension at the same time renews valid cultural knowledge by interpreting subjective experience in terms of cultural values, thereby serving the continuity of tradition and the coherence of knowledge. But it also explores and proposes new cultural values, and contributes towards the maintenance of both society and personality by legitimating existing institutions and providing models for the acquisition of generalised competencies. Thirdly, as regards a process of social integration, art while assuming certain action patterns and basing itself on stabilized group identities, at the dimension of social space co-ordinates actions and stabilizes group identity, thereby contributing towards the maintenance of both personality and culture by creating legitimately regulated social or interpersonal relations and generating normative or moral obligations.

2019

Art and social space are not conceivable one without another. Nevertheless, only little research has so far addressed this relationship of creative and social practice and its political and aesthetic implications in urban Africa and its global entanglement. Often, art is conceived either as apolitical practice of beautification and decoration in times of peace or as deeply political in times of unrest and oppression. This applies particularly to African settings that tend to be perceived as sites of crisis while evading the attention of mostly Western-centric art theory. It is therefore of particular importance to understand artistic articulation as a social and creative practice that operates also beyond moments of political and conflictual emergency. In what ways does art articulate social and political imagination, and how does artistic practice relate to such social and collective visions? How does articulation work and in what ways is it generative of visual, oral and performat...