Art, Research, Philosophy

The idea that art can be a form of research and, therefore, a contribution to knowledge, raises a number of philosophical questions such as: What is research in, through or for art? Should art draw upon research methods from other subjects, or develop its own? What kind of forms are produced or might be produced through artistic research?This is the first book to address the questions raised by visual arts research and is designed to give those working in the area new and challenging ways to reflect on how their practices engage with questions of knowledge-construction. Covering debates within aesthetics, epistemology and visual culture, this is an ideal text for art research students

The poetics of the fragment

Installation art has two defining features. The first is that it requires the experience of the viewer or visitor for its completion. This is on the understanding that what is offered in an installation is distributed in space, and therefore time, and it is the experience of the visitor that binds the elements together as they move in and around the installation’s various spaces. The second is that, in the absence of a single object that draws the eye’s attention, the viewer becomes ‘decentred’. They no longer have the security of knowing that, in this moment, they have direct and complete engagement with the work that stands before them. This paper argues that when the various elements making up the installation are understood as fragments, they can combine with the distributed and decentred aspects of installation to create a form of poetic expression. The arguments for understanding the elements of an installation as fragments, and for the poetic potential of the fragment, are made with reference to Sean Edwards' 2019 Cymru yn Fenis Wales in Venice installation

Art, Research, Philosophy

The idea that art can be a form of research and, therefore, a contribution to knowledge, raises a number of philosophical questions such as: What is research in, through or for art? Should art draw upon research methods from other subjects, or develop its own? What kind of forms are produced or might be produced through artistic research?This is the first book to address the questions raised by visual arts research and is designed to give those working in the area new and challenging ways to reflect on how their practices engage with questions of knowledge-construction. Covering debates within aesthetics, epistemology and visual culture, this is an ideal text for art research students

Sensation as participation in visual art

Can an understanding be formed of how sensory experience might be presented or manipulated in visual art in order to promote a relational concept of the senses, in opposition to the customary, capitalist notion of sensation as a private possession, as a sensory impression that is mine? I ask the question in the light of recent visual art theory and practice which pursue relational, ecological ambitions. As Arnold Berleant, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Grant Kester see it, ecological ambition and artistic form should correspond, but they fail to recognize sensation as a site where the ecological cause can be fought. Jacques Rancière argues for the political force of the senses, but his distribution of the sensible does not address the particularity of sensory experience. I identify the difference between these approaches within recent relational or ecological aesthetics and my position on sensibility, and indicate some of the problems involved in referring to the senses. I set out the concepts that are central to the cultivation of relational sensibility: style, autofiguration, and the mobility of sensory meaning, extrapolated from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Paul Cézanne. They amount to positioning the senses ontologically as movements along lines of conceptual-sensory connection and implication, based on the transfer of meanings created artistically through style and autofiguration

Living metaphor

The concept of ‘living metaphor’ receives a number of articulations within metaphor theory. A review of four key theories – Nietzsche, Ricoeur, Lakoff and Johnson, and Derrida – reveals a distinction between theories which identify a prior, speculative nature working on or with metaphor, and theories wherein metaphor is shown to be performatively always, already active in thought. The two cannot be left as alternatives because they exhibit opposing theses with regard to the ontology of metaphor, but neither can an impartial philosophical appraisal of the most cogent or defensible theory be made, since the status and conduct of philosophy are part of the problem. Two responses to the predicament from within ‘living metaphor’ theory are considered: (1) Lakoff and Johnson’s ecological spirituality thesis which promises to make the contest redundant on the grounds that the origin of human concepts in our shared, embodied condition in the world removes all obstructions; (2) taking the lead from Nietzsche and Ricoeur, an approach based on the intersection of discourses, not as a resolution but as a gesture which allows the conflict to speak about ‘living metaphor’. (1) is shown to be unsuccessful, but (2) results in ‘living metaphor’ emerging as an attentiveness to questions of what does and does not belong, inspired by tensions between ‘is’ and ‘is not’, ‘from this perspective’ and ‘from that perspective’, and ‘is spoken about’ and ‘is spoken with’

Art, Research, Philosophy

Seni, Penelitian, Filsafat mengeksplorasi bidang penelitian artistik yang muncul: seni diproduksi sebagai kontribusi terhadap pengetahuan. Sebagai subjek baru, ini menimbulkan beberapa pertanyaan: Apa itu seni sebagai penelitian? Bukankah tuntutan penelitian sama dengan pemaksaan pada proses artistik yang melemahkan kekuatan seni? Bagaimana sesuatu yang subjektif bisa menjadi objektif? Apa hubungan antara seni dan tulisan? Bukankah deskripsi selalu melewatkan kekhasan karya seni? Ini adalah studi panjang buku pertama yang menunjukkan bagaimana ide-ide dalam filsafat dapat diterapkan pada penelitian artistik untuk menjawab pertanyaannya dan membuat proposal untuk masa depannya. Clive Cazeaux berpendapat bahwa penelitian artistik merupakan perkembangan menarik dalam perdebatan sejarah antara estetika dan teori pengetahuan. Buku ini mengacu pada Kant, fenomenologi dan teori kritis untuk menunjukkan bagaimana kesegeraan seni dan pengalaman terjerat dalam struktur yang menciptakan pengetahuan. Kekuatan seni untuk bertindak atas struktur tersebut tergambar melalui rangkaian kajian yang mencermati sejumlah karya seni rupa kontemporer. Buku ini akan ideal untuk mahasiswa pascasarjana dan sarjana seni visual dan kreatif, estetika dan teori seni. Versi Akses Terbuka buku ini, tersedia di www.taylorandfrancis.com, telah tersedia di bawah lisensi Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0.https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/978131576461

“We Are a Musical Nation”: Under Milk Wood and the BBC Third Programme

This essay examines Dylan Thomas’s 1954 play Under Milk Wood in the context of the BBC Third Programme, the “high culture” station founded in the hopes that difficult art might improve public sentiment and intellectual health. Through the artworks themselves and through its flexible scheduling and strategic use of dead air, the Third Programme promoted “alert and perceptive listening,” a niche for aesthetic reflection independent of the marketplace, building on the cultural evangelism of the BBC’s founding Director General, John Reith. Thomas’s play ironizes these aims, using the sonic textures of language, the temporal structures of ritual, and a deconstructed anthropological gaze to supplant the Third Programme’s Arnoldian ideal of rational disinterestedness. Depicting an isolated Welsh village, Under Milk Wood implicitly critiques the horrors of war while declining to endorse the BBC’s sanctimonious promises of cultural uplift; rather, it produces an ironic, negative image of fascism’s self-defeating obsessions with civic uniformity and public health. Though Under Milk Wood promotes aesthetic reflection and aural empathy – akin to what Kate Lacey has referred to as “listening out” – Thomas reimagines these public values, not in the sense promoted by Matthew Arnold or Reith but in relation to the erotic, embodied rhythms of language and ritual. Under Milk Wood “remakes” time, in an ironic reflection of the Third Programme’s flexible scheduling, unsettling the condescension implicit in the play’s own radiophonic framing voices and demonstrating how broadcast media participate in the ritual construction of time’s passage