Welcome to the revolution: art history and the sensory turn (original) (raw)
Related papers
Embodying Art: The Spectator and the Inner Body
Poetics Today, 2010
Embodied approaches to art history concerned with empathic projection can be reinforced by introducing empirical research that corroborates experiential observations about a spectator's bodily responses and by a more nuanced repertoire of bodily focused viewing. To reinforce existing scholarship, I examine a study exemplary in its analysis of embodied experience, Michael Fried's Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (2002), proposing that the author's reported empathic experiences of Adolph Menzel's painting Rear Courtyard and House can be understood through concepts of sensorimotor imaging, hypnosis, and interoception. To expand the range and nuance of embodied responses, I rst counterpoint Fried's two interpretations of the painting Balcony Window, o ering a gendered reading and a taxonomy of three sensory modes of looking at art. Second, I shift to a micro level to explore how the spectator's breathing interacts with this painting and how these respiratory interactions create a mnemonic overlay that operates over time. Although these analyses focus on a nineteenth-century realist painting, the concepts and practices can be applied to diverse genres and media.
Philosophy of Photography, 2014
Rapidly changing intersectional processes of globalization, media and technology generate an urgent need for the reconsideration of experiential conditions involving time, space, place and the body. In Senses of Embodiment, editors Mika Elo and Miika Luoto have assembled nine essays from a diverse group of authors and artists in order to explore questions concerning the relationship between diverse and evolving media forms and the embodiment of 'sense'. Of course, sense, in the context of contemporary art practice and media studies, is a multifarious concept that refers to questions of ontology, affect and bodily perception. Elo and Luoto define the collection's approach through what they call 'mediality of sense', a phrase that denotes intersections between artistic presentation through new technologies, bodily capacity and aesthetic experience, and the reflexive interaction that may occur between the individual subject and technology.
A New Way of Seeing: Redefining the Spectator-Artwork Dynamic through an Interdisciplinary Approach
2023
This thesis contributes to the ongoing discourse on the aesthetic experience of the spectator in contemporary exhibitions through a dialectical engagement with disinterestedness and immersion. Investigating the shifting paradigm of aesthetic experience, this study questions the compatibility of the Kantian aesthetics with the immersive display techniques. Scrutinising the concepts of contemplation, isolation, distance, and immersion through an ocular-centric object-subject dichotomy, it explores the changing perspectives of art history and curatorial practices in relation to museum typologies. The aim is to critically evaluate the interplay between the spectator and the artwork within a novel paradigm that is conducive to both the essence of aesthetic experience and current perspectives. Utilizing empirical aesthetic studies, including neuroaesthetics, the study seeks to deepen our understanding of the complexities inherent in the evolving paradigm of aesthetic experience through an interdisciplinary approach. The study proposes embodiment and peripheral vision as a new paradigm that can offer a way of seeing to the viewer by dismantling the object- subject dichotomy.
Art as experience of the living body, Introduction
Art as experience of the living body, an East/West experience, 2023
This book analyses the dynamic relationship between art and subjective consciousness, following a phenomenological, pragmatist and enactive approach. It brings out a new approach to the role of the body in art, not as a speculative object or symbolic material but as the living source of the imaginary. It contains theoretical contributions and case studies taken from various artistic practices (visual art, theatre, literature and music), Western and Eastern, the latter concerning China, India and Japan. These contributions allow us to nourish the debate on embodied cognition and aesthetics, using theoryphilosophy, art history, neuroscience-and the authors' personal experience as artists or spectators. According to the Husserlian method of "reduction" and pragmatist introspection, they postulate that listening to bodily sensations-cramps, heartbeats, impulsive movements, eye orientation-can unravel the thread of subconscious experience, both active and affective, that emerge in the encounter between a subject and an artwork, an encounter which, following John Dewey, we deem to be a case study for life in general. Ce livre analyse la relation dynamique entre l'art et la conscience subjective, selon une approche phénoménologique, pragmatiste et enactive. Il vise à faire émerger une nouvelle approche du rôle du corps dans l'art, non pas comme objet spéculatif ou matériau symbolique, mais comme source vivante de l'imaginaire. Les contributions théoriques et les études de cas sont prises à diverses pratiques artistiques (arts visuels, théâtre, littérature et musique), occidentales et orientales, ces dernières concernant la Chine, l'Inde et le Japon. Selon la méthode husserlienne de « réduction », en écho à l'introspection pragmatiste, les textes témoignent que l'écoute des sensations corporelles-crampes, battements de coeur, mouvements pulsionnels, orientation des yeux-mises en jeu par l'oeuvre, permet de dénouer le fil de l'expérience inconsciente, à la fois kinesthésique et affective, qui émerge dans la rencontre entre un sujet et une oeuvre d'art, une rencontre comprise, à la manière de Dewey, comme un cas d'école de la vie en général. Christine Vial Kayser (PhD, HDR) is an art historian and museum curator (emeritus). She is an Associate researcher with Héritages (CYU) and a member of the Doctoral School 628-AHSS. Her research relates to the capacity of art to transform representations within an individual and in the collective mind, through embodied, mnemonic, and affective processes, in a global, comparative (East/west context). She works at the crossroads of art theory, anthropology, and neuroaesthetics. Christine Vial Kayser (PhD, HDR) est historienne de l'art et conservatrice de musée (émérite). Elle est chercheur associé à Héritages (CYU) et membre de l'ED 628-AHSS. Ses recherches portent sur la capacité de l'art à transformer les représentations au sein d'un individu et dans le cadre collectif, à travers des processus incarnés, mémoriels et affectifs, dans un contexte global et comparatif (Est/Ouest). Elle travaille au croisement de la théorie de l'art, de l'anthropologie et de la neuroesthétique.
The Sensuous as Source of Demand: A Response to Jennifer McMahon's "Aesthetics of Perception"
Essays in Philosophy, 2012
In this response paper I defend an alternative position to both Jennifer McMahon's neo-Kantian view on the aesthetics of perceptual experience, and the sense-data theory that she rightly repudiates. McMahon argues that sense perception is informed by concepts "all the way out," and that the empiricist notion of unmediated sensuous access to entities in the world is untenable. She further claims that art is demanding inasmuch as it compels one to engage in an open-ended, cognitive interpretive process with sensuous phenomena, and that it is this very process that opens up a space for critique of the entrenched representational concepts by which we navigate the world. In contrast, I argue that the sensuous itself is a source of demand. Perceptual objects, in virtue of their material constitution, are inexhaustible plexuses of meaning that demand a kind of sensuous, interpretive response on the part of our bodily posture and orientation. Works of art offer opportunities for critique insofar as they reveal dimensions of sensuous reality hitherto covered over by status quo conceptual distributions. McMahon is right that sensuous objects are never simply given. But, I claim, she is wrong to suggest that it is only by way of conceptual mediation that we make contact with the world. On the contrary, the sensuous self-presentation of things is always at the same time a demand on our sensory apparatus that resists encapsulation by concepts.
“Aesthetics and its Objects – Challenges from Art and Experience”
Halsall et all eds. Special Edition of the “Journal of Visual Art Practice” Susan Best, ‘Minimalism, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics: Rethinking the Anti-aesthetic Tradition in late-modern art’ Anna Dezeuze, ‘Everyday life, “Relational Aesthetics”, and the “Transfiguration of the Common-Place”’ Riikka Haapalainen, ‘Contemporary Art and the Role of Museum as Situational Media’ Andy Hamilton, ‘Indeterminacy and Reciprocity: Contrasts and Connections between Natural and Artistic Beauty’ Joanna Lowry, ‘Putting Painting in the Picture (Photographically)’ Toni Ross, ‘Aesthetic Autonomy and Interdisciplinarity: A Response to Nicolas Bourriaud’s “Relational Aesthetics”’ William P. Seeley, ‘Naturalizing Aesthetics: Art and the Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision’ Jeremy Spencer, ‘Body and Embodiment in Modernist Painting’
Materialising the unseen : the multisensory cinema of the invisible body
2014
The long century of western cinema has produced numerous depictions of invisible bodies – those bodies that function as any other, save for the distinctive feature of their invisibility. The invisible body challenges conventions of cinematic production, presentation and reception, suggesting an ‘extra-visual’ cinema. But, as well as this, the invisible body also challenges conceptions of the limits and categorisation of the human sensorium. In tracing a sensory history of invisible bodies, this thesis is concerned with how such depictions connect with and contribute to constructions of the senses in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This thesis thus makes an original contribution to knowledge by asking: What kind of history of the senses can be found in the onscreen invisible body? In doing so, this thesis engages a film theory of the senses that asks what the depiction of the invisible body – itself a delicate cultural construction that has no direct equivalent in nat...