On Encountering Indifferent Objects

Reclaiming art, reshaping democracy (Les presses du réel, 2017), dir. E. Zhong Mengual, X. Douroux

2014

This presentation explores how 'encounter' is different from 'event' and making this differentiation has important implications on how we imagine the relationship of art to audience. The author introduces some theoretical foundations to the notion of 'encounter' and then explores an imaginary scenario where artwork is viewed in a new way.

Speculations V, 2014

2017

In this essay I will discuss the specific nature of art practices in which the artist and his audience are moving away from the more traditional relationship in which the artist merely displays his art in museums or public spaces. They consist of intimate and personal processes made possible by the grace of the artistic space that is separating itself from the coded space around it. In these practices the public takes on a different role than that of the passive spectator. The involvement of the public in what art is and can be becomes part of the experience. This turns art into something to be a part of rather than something that is simply handed over to you. More specifically, these art practices allow for a time and site-specific situated form of co-ownership, through which the artistic environment created by the artist becomes the condition for experiencing new ideas and insights. In relation to theatre, the French philosopher Jacques Ranciere (1940-) writes in The Emancipated S...

Signs, 2015

P henomenally strong artworks have the potential to anchor us in the world and to cultivate our perception. For the most part, we barely notice the world around us, as we are too often elsewhere, texting, coordinating schedules, planning ahead, navigating what needs to be done. This is the level of our age that shapes the ways we encounter the world and others. 1 In such a world it is no wonder we no longer trust our senses. But as feminists have long argued, thinking grounded in embodied experience is more open to difference and helps us to resist the colonization of a singular, only seemingly neutral, perspective that closes down living potentialities.

This paper traces the steps to social aesthetics as exemplified in four well-known paintings. It begins by affirming the central place of sense experience for aesthetics and the refinement of perceptual acuity in a developed sensibility. This leads to associating aesthetic appreciation with such perceptual experience. Rejecting the identification of disinterestedness with such appreciation, I propose the full participatory involvement in the experience of appreciation as expressed by the concept of aesthetic engagement. This can be shown by describing the appreciative situation as an aesthetic field in which the perceptual, creative, focusing, and activating factors are in reciprocal interaction, and it is seen clearly in appreciating personal, social, natural, and built environments. A social aesthetics exemplifies these environments in aesthetic engagement as shown by the gaze in the experience of the four paintings presented at the beginning.

This article explores the pragmatics of artworks, arguing that they are best understood as social actions, and as modes of address that lack the settled semantics and syntax of ordinary sentences. Three modes of address are explored, with Anselm's Kiefer's "Nigredo" (1986) serving as a central example. Implications for art criticism are also explored.

in Rearranging the Riddle, ed. Cristiana de Marchi Sharjah: Maraya Art Centre, 2020, pp. 66-75