Keywords: aesthetic
experience, politics, public, contemporary art, Ranciere, Dewey, Leddy
The adjectives we keep using during the
discussions about perception and experience of contemporary art are in a wide
range. They reflect both positive and negative senses we get. Didactic,
disturbing, cheap, shallow, repulsive or poetic, transformative, magical,
impressive, subtle, ingenious, strong, or as a more common reaction: beautiful.
Even though it is perfectly natural, something that someone find “beautiful”
will be not beautiful for someone else, since appreciating art is deeply
subjective, I got curios about the reason that makes public like or not like a
contemporary artwork in public space.
Space and medium is closely relevant to the
experience. As Jacques Ranciere pointed out, it’s not simply an instrument of
art. It is the specific materiality that defines art’s essence.[1] When it is
literature or music it is possible to make art without politicize it while
offering a unique experience like Pessoa did with his poetry. However in visual
arts, space as a part of the artwork, reflects its spatial character to work.
That is why it is still possible to put a completely meaningless sculpture to
an art gallery which is designed to have no character yet it would
automatically be an artwork since gallery is a space to collect “art”.[2] But
is it possible for same sculpture to stay meaningless in a public square where
people can physically interact with it and receive it as a part of their
everyday experience? Is it possible for something meaningless to keep being an
artwork? Can meaninglessness and transformative experience survive together in
a public space? Is it possible aesthetisize the political art in public space?
Is it possible to write a poem through visual arts in public space?
Baumgarten defined aesthetic; a theory of
aistheta, of things perceived, and of sensate thinking. In her book Çoğul
Estetik, Jale Nejdet Erzen explaining the factors that effect our perception of
art starting from the 19th century. Even though some of the explanations are
still valid since then like cultural, psychological or biological, new approaches
and perspectives emerge everyday.[3] What I want to focus is contemporary
“everyday” aesthetics.
According to John Dewey, the quality of
aesthetic experience is unity. It must pursue the fulfillment or completition
of an object, or event so that the experience is presented in an integral way .[4] However Tom Leddy adds something else to that perspective: “the ordinary
qua ordinary is uninteresting or boring and only becomes aesthetic when
transformed” and affects that transformation through the notion of “aura”. To
him, aura is not an aesthetic property but an experience of an object as
“having the quality heightened significance in which it seems to extend beyond
itself”. He defends we need to experience an object –or event in Deweyian
sense- as (i) being somehow greater than itself, (ii) as having a surrounding
“glow”, and as seeming more real and alive.[5]
Rancier on the other hand took the notion of
aesthetic a step further by thinking it within the scope of contemporary art
and come up with a new notion “politics of aesthetics”. He use the phrase
“community of sense” in his article and defined it “as a frame of visibility
and intelligibility that puts things or practices together under the same
meaning which shapes thereby a certain sense of community. A community of sense
is a certain cutting out of space and time that binds together practices, forms
of visibility, and pattern of intelligibility. I call this cutting out and this
linkage a partition of sensible.” Ranciere doesn’t specifically cover the
public art and interaction yet he refers it when saying “Art and politics, in
fact, are contingent configurations of the common that may or may not exist.
Just as there is not always art (though there is always music, sculpture, dance
and so on), there is not always politics (though there are always forms of
power and consent). Politics exists in specific communities of sense. It exists
as a dissensual supplement to the other forms of human gathering, as a
polemical redistribution of objects and subjects, places and identities, spaces
and times, visibilities and meanings.” [6] I think that is what makes the “mere
experience” “an experience” as Dewey said and maybe when contradictions come
together poems can emerge in public space.
[1]
Ranciere, J. (2008) What Medium Can Mean?
[2] O’Doherty,
B. (2010) Beyaz Küpün İçinde
[3] Erzen,
J.N. (2011) Çoğul Estetik
[4] Dewey,
J (1934) Art as Experience
[5] Leddy,
T. (2012) The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life
[6]
Ranciere, J. (2009) Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics
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