Authors:Rob van Gerwen Pages: i - vi Abstract: In this Editor’s column I discuss certain fruits and limits of applying the notion of ‘performance’ to works of art. Art works can be viewed as perfor- mances, the public furnishing of works’ final form. Concerts can be viewed as performances of a work scored by someone else, the composer, but not all arts are double in this sense. Moreover, art can be viewed as mirroring the psychological, phenomenological and rhetorical aspects of human interaction, which exemplify the way people scrutinise moral situations. Not all performances are artistic, let alone art. PubDate: 2021-12-31 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5816620 Issue No:Vol. 5, No. 1 (2021)
Authors:Aurélie Debaene Pages: 7 - 27 Abstract: In this paper, I argue that modelling occupies a curious role in the art making process, and that it constitutes a hybrid art form. Modelling is intriguingly under-research in aesthetics, despite it being a cornerstone of art education and deeply involved in various art practices. It functions both within a supportive role to further the goals of art making, while also retaining the creative agency and performance of the professional model upon which the artist, photographer, or wider crew rely. This ability entails not merely helping to steer a posing session, but experimenting with and adapting to any unexpected issues that arise in the course of the session. To understand the salient performative qualities of modelling, I first focus on expert movement, improvisation, and style. Second, I reflect on how modelling corresponds to creativity and skill. Finally, I propose that the model is a performer, and that, ultimately, modelling should be recognised as a hybrid collaborative art form which incorporates qualities of various performing arts. PubDate: 2021-12-30 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5816692 Issue No:Vol. 5, No. 1 (2021)
Authors:Ken Wilder Pages: 28 - 50 Abstract: Might architecture be reconceived as a form of performance' I draw upon Nelson Goodman’s writing on architecture—including his account of architectural notation—and David Davies’s performance theory, which claims that artworks should be considered not as products made by generative performances, but rather as the performances themselves. I tie the exemplification that Goodman identifies as the primary way architectural works ‘mean’ to the role of the architectural ‘score’, recast not as a mere ‘constraint’ but as integral to the creative processes by which architecture establishes an ‘artistic statement’ and a distinctive ‘virtual’ realm. In so doing, I reconcile such a position with an aesthetics of reception, whereby the situated encounter with the physical building is seen as essential to the critical retrieval of any given architectural performance. I test this position against a late work by Sigurd Lewerentz, completed when he was in his eighties, and examine the extraordinary lengths necessitated by his idiosyncratic imperative not to cut any bricks, thereby articulating an artwork every bit as radical as contemporaneous works by conceptual artists. PubDate: 2021-12-30 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5816772 Issue No:Vol. 5, No. 1 (2021)
Authors:Frank Boardman Pages: 51 - 63 Abstract: The stand-up special is growing cultural significance just as it is maturing and becoming more distinct as an art form. Philosophical treatments of the special are therefore neither frivolous nor redundant. I argue here that such inquiry can be aided by a definitional account of “special” and that an essential definition – if one is available- would serve us best. I then offer a candidate definition of this kind and reply to some likely objections to it. PubDate: 2021-12-30 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5816817 Issue No:Vol. 5, No. 1 (2021)
Authors:Sue Spaid Pages: 64 - 81 Abstract: Given the coterie of philosophers focused on everyday aesthetics, it's fascinating that gift reception has heretofore managed to escape their scrutiny. To enact a gift, recipients begin by imagining its use. On this level, gifts serve as a litmus test. In luring us, we're taken out of our normal ways of being to experience a different side of ourselves. Enacting a gift is thus a kind of performance, whose value depends on the donee’s interpretation, just as exhibitions, concerts, staged plays or books are performances of visual art, scores, scripts or texts, whose interpretations demonstrate their aesthetic value. To develop the relationship between enacting gifts and performing artworks, I begin by surveying junctures along the gift-event’s arc: reply, imagination, trust, recognition, transformation and memory. Transformations arising from agonistic gifts strike me as significant because they characterise the way gifts challenge our beliefs, eventually altering our values. That we grow to love gifts, which we originally rejected out of hand, casts doubt on self-knowledge. Enacted gifts handily challenge self-knowledge’s twin features: authority and transparency. As this paper indicates, gift reception helps both to understand ourselves better and to remove the obstacles to what Quassim Cassim calls Substantive Self-Knowledge. PubDate: 2021-12-30 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5817385 Issue No:Vol. 5, No. 1 (2021)
Authors:Rossen Ventzislavov Pages: 82 - 90 Abstract: The work of artist Ron Athey has long befuddled the art historical establishment and has mostly remained under the philosophical radar. In this review of Athey’s Acephalous Monster, performed on August 28, 2021, at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in Los Angeles, I propose a philosophical frame- work for Athey’s radical reinvention of ethical categories like agency, mutuality and communion. I describe the performance and its critical context in order to tease out the aesthetic dimension of this reinvention and the subversive power of reconstituting personhood along lines of collective artistic jubilation and creative survival. PubDate: 2021-12-30 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5817413 Issue No:Vol. 5, No. 1 (2021)
Authors:Dror Pimentel Pages: 91 - 98 Abstract: The film The Survivalist portrays a dystopic world, wherein the most valuable asset is seeds. The 'seeds' metaphor applies both in the context of agriculture and in that of fecundity. The Survivalist's hostile hospitality toward a pair of nomads -- a mother and her daughter -- results in the pregnancy of the latter. In the last raid on his compound, the Survivalist allows the daughter to escape at the expense of his own life. This sacrifice manifests a severe critique against the preference given today to the well-being of the individual at the expense of the survival of the species. PubDate: 2021-12-31 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5817471 Issue No:Vol. 5, No. 1 (2021)
Authors:Gemma Argüello Manresa Pages: 99 - 110 Abstract: This paper shows how the early feminist pedagogical performance artworks of the Mexican artist Mónica Mayer are example of Connective Aesthetics and Conversational Art. PubDate: 2021-12-31 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5830032 Issue No:Vol. 5, No. 1 (2021)
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