Aesthetic Participation as a Realisation of Social and Cultural Poiesis
Journal Title: Art Inquiry. Recherches sur les arts - Year 2018, Vol 20, Issue
Abstract
Abstract: In this essay, I will attempt to present a model of aesthetics based on a distinctive way of understanding artistic participation, relying on examples from the conceptions of Michel Maffesoli and Nicolas Bourriaud. My characterization does not claim to provide a complete description of the phenomenon in art and in contemporary theoretical approaches. Instead, I will attempt to show that the model, despite its narrow formula, provides a good opportunity to showcase certain shifts that have occurred in contemporary aesthetics due to late modern (especially characteristic of the post-industrial age) processes of de-autonomization. These shifts can be traced in the space of tension between two categories: distance and engagement. I will also show that the shifts open a new way of defining the subject of artistic creation. The subject no longer has an individual or intentional nature, nor yields to a substantialising characterization. The creative force is the self-articulating social life converged in human practices (and, among others – in artistic practices). In a way, Bourriaud and Maffesoli reuse a well-known philosophical template: one in which the poietic power of creation is alternately bestowed upon Nietzsche’s life, Heidegger’s or late Merleau-Ponty’s Being, Dufrenne’s self-creating Nature etc. Bourriaud and Maffesoli, in their conceptions of artistic and aesthetic participation, fall within – and this is my overall conclusion which serves as the guideline for the present analysis – in such a generally understood poietic model.
Authors and Affiliations
Iwona Lorenc
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP429345
- DOI 10.26485/AI/2018/20/1
- Views 123
- Downloads 0
Neomodernist Digital Painting
Since the beginning of the 21st century we can observe a kind of revival of specifically modernist features, characteristics, and aims in the art practice which focuses on creating images. I presume that digital painting...
The poetics of modernism in the graphic novel. Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan as a neomodernist text
The present article seeks to analyze aspects of modernist poetics contributing to the unique, essentially neomodernist, aesthetics in Chris Ware’s 2000 graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Particular...
The avant-garde: art as theory
The starting point of the paper are the questions formulated in 1993 by Philip Auslander as to whether the avant-garde is possible in postmodernism, or whether postmodernism itself can be regarded as a new phase of the a...
Neo/modernism – philosophical awareness in art
We are confronting a major problem with naming the artistic and philosophical moment we have found ourselves in. It should be perceived as significant that the numerous names for the artistic and philosophical responses...
Telling images? The self-reflexive turn in contemporary American graphic novels
This article proposes to see graphic novel as the epitome of a twofold turn. First, as the genre of the pictorial turn, a form that demonstrates the transition from the verbal to the visual. Indeed, the graphic novel can...