Abstract

In this paper, I will question the relation between art and space through my works. The question that I have an urge to answer or justify why I ask it in the first place: “How can boundaries between an artwork and space disappear?”. I will analyze the works that I have produced and will produce that touches the boundaries. With consideration of public space as a multilayered notion I will try to explore these layers that can be sensed everyday. I will try to move my works, which I make with the motivation that Nicolas Bourriaud called “relational aesthetics”, out of my studio. I will design everyday encounters and will discuss how and why those works relating with space, how medium affecting this relation and what is the result of that kind of relation.

Aesthetics of Relations

Keywords: aesthetics, relations, politics, public, contemporary art, Bourriaud, Bishop

Another article that I find resemblance with my questions is Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud and at the beginning of his article Bourriaud asks these questions as well: “What are the real challenges of contemporary art? What are its links with society, history and culture?” [1] I think to stay in the context or more importantly to have a context in the first place, these are very important starting points.

Bourriaud define the artistic activity as a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts; it is not an immutable essence. This is what creates relational form and relational form consists a possibility of relational art (an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent art and private symbolic space), points to a radical upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced by modern art. According to him it is no longer possible to regard the contemporary work as a space to be walk through, instead it is presented as a period of time to be lived through, like an opening to unlimited discussion. It is similar to John Dewey’s definition of “live creature” linked to its environment in order to has experiences continuously.

He consider artwork as social interstice like Joseph Beuys considered it as a social sculpture and defended that contemporary art is developing a political project when it endeavors to move into relational realm by turning it into an issue. However Claire Bishop, in her article Antagonism and Relational Art challenged that approach. She asks in what type, for whom and why human relations should be produced through relational art? She find the “unlimited discussion” functionless and considers it as a celebration of what is already there. She promote that if a work of art is not disruptive it will never become a place where transformative change happens. [2]

I think the theory of Bourriaud has problematic sides, because he, as a curator, believes that social relations can be constructed through art institutions, but then the question Bishop asked become more meaningful. Since art institutions are not part of everyday life, relational art will not be relational enough to become poetic and public at the same time.

[1] Bourriaud, N. (1998), Relational Aesthetics

[2] Bishop, C. (2004), Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics

Aesthetics of Experience

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