Showing papers in "Journal of Visual Art Practice in 2006"

Naturalizing aesthetics: art and the cognitive neuroscience of vision

Abstract: Recent advances in our understanding of the cognitive neuroscience of perception have encouraged cognitive scientists and scientifically minded philosophers to turn their attention towards art and the problems of philosophical aesthetics. This ‘cognitive turn’ does not represent an entirely novel paradigm in the study of art. Alexander Baumgarten originally introduced the term ‘aesthetics’ to refer to a science of perception. Artists’ formal methods are a means to cull the structural features necessary for constructing clear perceptual representations from a dense flux of sensory information in conscious experience. Therefore he interpreted artists’ formal methods as tools for studying the structure of perception, and art as a field whose interests overlapped with aesthetics. In what follows, I examine three approaches to cognitive science and aesthetics that rest on a tacit assumption of Baumgarten's program. I argue that, whereas this new research can explain how viewers perceptually recover the...

Everyday life, ‘relational aesthetics’ and the ‘transfiguration of the commonplace’

Abstract: This essay addresses the ways in which the relation between art and the everyday life has been discussed by authors Arthur Danto (in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 1981), and Nicolas Bourriaud (in Relational Aesthetics, 1999). While both studies are significant attempts to grapple with the new relation between art and life explored by successive generations of artists (in the 1960s and the 1990s), I argue that neither are able to tackle the specificity of the everyday in art because they take definitions of the ‘everyday’ or ‘commonplace’ for granted. In contrast, I suggest ways in which reference to studies of everyday life such as Michel de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life can help complement aesthetics' focus on definitions of art. Such a focus on everyday life, I argue, can shed light on 1960s works by Pop and Fluxus artists as well as contemporary ‘relational’ practices such as those by Rirkrit Tiravanija's.

Aesthetic autonomy and interdisciplinarity: a response to Nicolas Bourriaud's ‘relational aesthetics’

Abstract: Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of ‘relational aesthetics’ has proved an influential framework for understanding discipline cross overs in art of the 1990s. This paper traces precedents in aesthetic philosophy, both Kantian and Marxist that inform Bourriaud's account of the relational aesthetic of contemporary art. In the process it registers a number of points of disagreement with the liberal view of democratic social bonds, and the links between aesthetics, ethics and politics that Borriaud propounds. The critical terms of my response to relational aesthetics are derived from a Neo-Marxist thinking of democracy, and the relation between aesthetics and politics developed by philosopher Jacques Ranciere. This questioning of Bourriaud's claims about the democratic incline of relational aesthetics is fleshed out by an examination of the cross disciplinary art of Mark Dion. Dion is known for producing performative, site-specific events and installations that incorporate the discourses and professional pr...

Minimalism, subjectivity, and aesthetics: rethinking the anti-aesthetic tradition in late-modern art

Abstract: Minimalism, Subjectivity and Aesthetics: Rethinking the Anti-Aesthetic Tradition in Late-modern Art.Minimalism is routinely interpreted as anti-subjective, anti-expressive and anti-aesthetic. This paper challenges this interpretation by closely examining two accounts of minimalism: Rosalind Krauss's article of 1973, “Sense and Sensibility,” and Thierry de Duve's amplification and refutation of aspects of Krauss' argument in his 1983 article, “Performance Here and Now.” Each believes that minimalism presents a model of subjectivity, and each produces an account of subjectivity that is both embedded in the work and yet produced by the viewer's interaction with it. Krauss and de Duve do not agree on the theory of the subject that Minimalism enacts, despite agreeing that a model of subjectivity is what is at stake in minimalist art.One can clearly see here the revival of Hegel's claim that the task of art is to “present man with himself” as well as a renewed focus on the nature of aesthetic reception....

Fault Lines: Four short observations on places of peace, trauma and contested remembrance

Abstract: Preservation of historical remains is ridden with complexity. In particular, battle landscapes are multi-layered, with many different and intersecting ideas and meanings about identity, place and landscape production. This article explores the site of battle as a place of the imagination, as a site of continued dispute, a ‘debatable land’. Focusing on contested terrain in northern Europe, the article also briefly examines the creation of new monuments in ‘imperial’ London and New York, suggesting that the lack of a dialogical rationale for such memorabilia fails to extend the language of remembrance, settling instead for monolithic forms that perpetuate the status quo, prioritizing the ‘plinth’ over more fluid forms of remembering.

The making of ‘place’ to enable memory

Abstract: Identity is a construct, so is place. The reflection on place and its interpretation in relation to time and space has been dealt with throughout the history of philosophy from the most diverse perspectives. My personal approach to place is that of an artist with a particular interest in how we physically perceive and measure ‘real space’ in a time context that is defined by the movement of our own body through it. The endeavour of reflecting on how one might pursue the idea of place has led to the gathering of a body of photographs that document my immediate personal environment to enable memory. The images provide a visual methodology that engages with the notion of dwelling and nearness. Photography is considered in its ability to study aspects of Dasein (in the Heideggerian sense) and to represent duration, repetition and change. The text elaborates on relations between proximity, nomadic space, identity and the question of belonging.

Politics, desire and memory in the construction of landscape in the Argentine pampas

Abstract: Although some German, English and French artists who came to South America from the beginning of the nineteenth century travelled to the Argentine pampas, they failed to see them as a possible landscape. During that century — the era of exploration, colonization and landscape painting in America — no landscapes were painted of those immense plains. This absence will be the centre of these reflections, focusing on two main issues: on the one hand the role of schemata from the perception to the representation of nature, and on the other, the interaction of national politics regarding the ways of appropriation of the land with the emergence of desire and memory in the construction of landscape. I will also analyse the photo-performances of contemporary artist Juan Doffo as a visual and affective reflection on these issues.

Indeterminacy and reciprocity: contrasts and connections between natural and artistic beauty

Abstract: This article offers a vindication of the indeterminacy of natural beauty, first through a dissolution of the antinomy between a critical and a positive aesthetics of nature, then through a resolution of the frame problem. These arguments are developed, finally, through a defence of the reciprocity thesis prominent in post-Kantian aesthetics, which claims that there is a conceptual connection between the aesthetic appreciation of art and that of nature. I am concerned to defend indeterminacy against objections from environmental aesthetics and aesthetic realism, and to give qualified support to Adorno's historicist position in Aesthetic Theory. Underlying my approach is a Kantian emphasis on the ubiquity of the aesthetic and the democracy of taste.

Realities and histories: ‘In search of a hidden landscape’

Abstract: The intersection of geological and human histories in a northern Pennine landscape, covering the metalliferous mining areas of County Durham, Cumbria and Northumberland (formerly the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland) known as the Northern Pennine ore field. On 11 December 1998 Bob and Joe Forster worked the final shift on the 260 East Level at Frazer's Hush fluorspar mine in the Vale of Rookhope, County Durham. In July 1999 the long history of hard-rock mining in the Northern Pennines ended with the closure of the Firestone Dib (decline) at Groverake Mine a half-mile east of Frazer's Hush. In an area now designated a landscape of outstanding natural beauty and granted European geo-park status in 2003 the residue of this industrial heritage is all that remains of an extraordinary convergence of geological and human histories. The specific focus of this article relates to the extensive history of metalliferous mining that has taken place in the region possibly since the Romano-British period,...

The excavated object

Abstract: The search for new forms of representation of our relationship to the land engages us in exploring this relationship and how it can be embodied in our chosen medium. Working from a concept of painting as metaphor and our relationship to the land as that embodied in archaeology, this explores how a study of archaeological excavation can enrich painting, and how painting can put our understanding of archaeology in a new light. The work progressed through replicating what was seen and felt and through physically replicating the archaeologists' changing postures. In the final paintings the body comes to the fore, sometimes merging with the ground and sometimes with the remains. The painter identifies with the archaeologist through the development of a shared body-ground, but in the paintings the abstract time of history has been replaced by a sense of the ongoing life of the object as it emerges in the present.

Contemporary art and the role of museums as situational media

Abstract: In this paper I analyse some examples from contemporary art and describe the role of museums as a situational media, through which a special kind of sociality is produced. In this context, I want to draw attention to the so-called ‘new institutionalism’, which seems to be the current denominator among different fields within the art world (including both art institutions and contemporary artists). New institutionalism refers to a recent resurgence of interest in the influence of art institutions on the production and reception of art. It generally understands art in terms of the ideas of openness, networking and process.Consequently, the reception of art should not be perceived only as a private contemplation by an individual, but must be understood also as a form of social, collective experience. According to French sociologist Michel Maffesoli, art is more and more experienced and interpreted collectively. It is experienced in a temporal and social process, which is similar to urban everyday exp...

Back to Africa: from Natal to natal in the locations of memory

Abstract: Using an unexpected attachment to the film Zulu as a springboard to recovered attachment to a landscape in South Africa where I was born, this article explores the concept of natal memory — itself a pun on the place of birth and earliest memories of place and the association resulting from being born in South Africa with what is now the province KwaZulu-Natal where I spent summer holidays. Working from family album photographs in which an anonymous African woman disappeared into the uniform of domestic servitude is unexpectedly captured in a family snap of myself and my mother, I slip down a further chain of associations to the artist Charlotte Salomon who created a single vast artwork of 1325 paintings that restaged her own childhood through urban and holiday spaces that relate to Walter Benjamin's ideas of bio-mapping, mapping memory. Through the connection to German-Jewish expressionism and modernist painting, I am able to bring into view a South African-born German-Jewish artist Irma Stern, a ...

Some thoughts on feeling at home

Abstract: I use my artistic practice and certain ideas about trauma and witnessing as the framework for this article. I take a look at the concept of artistic practice as dwelling, which here is understood as synonymous with both a making of place and a feeling at home. What I want to problematize is not the notion of artistic practice as a way of being in place, but rather that this implies housing oneself or feeling at home. I will consider artistic practice and the viewing of artwork as a possible instance of losing oneself, of becoming what I would like to call unaccommodated.

Editorial Introduction Aesthetics and its objects — challenges from art and experience

Abstract: (2006). Editorial Introduction Aesthetics and its objects — challenges from art and experience. Journal of Visual Art Practice: Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 123-126.

Putting painting in the picture (photographically)

Abstract: It seems to be the case that when photography and painting become entangled, one becoming both a copy and a commentary upon the other, then a series of complex discursive issues get put into play. The photograph always seems to be in excess of the painting, engaging with it performatively, whilst painting is posed in these forms of contemporary practice, not as a single point of reference, to be mimicked or copied, but as a discursive presence troubling the security of the photographic image, producing a differentiated space of representation that opens up a more complex articulation of the way in which photography intersects with the field of the visible.

Recovering landscape: an art between seeing and hearing

Abstract: Cultural geographers have recently argued that landscape is experienced in an embodied way through a complex weave of senses: including sight, sound, smell, touch and social organization and experience. This has led to calls for a reassessment of hearing as a ‘way of dwelling’. The article focuses on music to question Lucy Lippard's 1997 book The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society — seen by many as a key text in relation to the interaction between visual art, social activism and cultural geography — asking why, in its 292 pages, there are no more than half a dozen references to music. Lippard's claim that place is for her ‘the locus of desire’ is rendered problematic because, as Janet Wolff demonstrates, the music that we listen to, particularly in our teens, plays a key part in locating us in the life world. Given Lippard's deliberate weaving of her own experience into the text, what might the absence of music suggest? Using the work of Rebecca Solnit, the article offer...

The bodies and the embodiment of modernist painting

Abstract: This paper considers the theme of materialism that emerged in the late writings of Paul de Man. Drawing on de Man's late essays and lectures, it outlines materialism as a factor of language that philosophical aesthetics must constantly resist or evade to ensure the stability of the category of the aesthetic. It focuses on de Man's still challenging and provocative antipathy towards the category of the aesthetic manifested in the imagery of bodily mutilation of the late writings. The essay then focuses on how these de Manian themes, summed up by the phrase ‘aesthetic ideology’, have been taken up in the writings on modernism of T. J. Clark. It considers two essays on Paul Cezanne to highlight the iconoclastic role Man's elaboration of materialism plays in them. Clark's ‘Freud's Cezanne’ and ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Cezanne’ see in Cezanne's late painting a disruption or disarticulation of humanism and the body as founding principles of the aesthetic and are marked by a suspicion of the cla...

Resort: re/visiting, re/visioning, re/placing

Abstract: This article describes an innovative relationship between the practice of landscape painting with theoretical research into second-generation memory. I adopt a practitioner's perspective by investigating the implications of the exchange between the materiality of both paint and landscape, the processes of painting and theoretical issues concerning second-generation memory. The form of this article has evolved out of a methodology parallel to my practice of painting: the issues have developed out of the painting objects and the painting processes, thus demonstrating how a very specific relationship with and understanding of both ‘landscape’ and postmemory might be embedded in the creative process itself.