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The Relationship Between the Concepts of Aesthetics and Community in Recent Art Theory and Criticism Marco Marcon a Thesis

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The Relationship Between the Concepts of Aesthetics and Community in Recent Art Theory and Criticism Marco Marcon a Thesis The Relationship Between the Concepts of Aesthetics and Community in Recent Art Theory and Criticism Marco Marcon A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Submitted to the School of Art History and Art Theory, College of Fine Arts, The University of New South Wales August 2013 Declaration I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and, to the best of my knowledge, it contains no material previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgment is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project’s design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged. Marco Marcon Signed: Date: August 2013 i Abstract This thesis explores the relationship between ideas of aesthetics and community in recent art theory and criticism in the context of a resurgence of artistic practices emphasising participation, social engagement and collaboration. These two concepts have been regarded with suspicion in the critical and theoretical trends that came to prominence in the nineteen sixties. Aesthetics was seen as the province of politically disengaged elites with a vested interest in stripping art of any concrete relationship to the social field, while community was often associated with a nostalgic longing for an idealised, conflict-free social order that never existed. However, in recent times the two notions have been subjected to serious reconsideration by a range of influential art theorists, curators and critics. This revival has, at least in part, occurred in response to the resurgence of participatory and socially engaged art since the nineteen nineties. Responding to these developments, this thesis argues that the aesthetics/community nexus lies at the core of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement and that this foundational text of Western aesthetic philosophy can be reinterpreted to both clarify and refigure the terms of the current debate about socially inclined art. The continuing relevance of Kant’s thought can be evinced by his influence on many, and often radically contrasting, theoretical positions including Clement Greenberg’s formalism, Thierry de Duve’s account of the Duchampian turn, Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern sublime and, more recently, Jacques Rancière’s theory of aesthetics and politics. ii This study conducts a comparative analysis of texts by the aforementioned thinkers, as well as selected writings on art and community by Martin Heidegger. The examination of these philosophical reflections is interwoven with a discussion of writings by prominent analysts of the recent social turn in art such as Claire Bishop, Grant Kester, Nicolas Bourriaud, Boris Groys, Nato Thompson, Miwon Kwon, Suzanne Lacy and Claire Doherty. My investigation of these and other relevant texts proposes that recent discourses and curatorial practices focused on the relation between art and community suggest an indirect Heideggerian influence that co-exists with more explicit references to Kant’s third Critique. Ultimately I propose the possibility of a synthesis of the seemingly divergent Kantian and Heideggerian perspectives. Specifically, I contend that Kant’s idea of ‘play’ and Heidegger’s concept of ‘strife’ are based on a similar vision of the aesthetic as openness to the indeterminate. My study concludes that this conception of the aesthetic provides an interpretive paradigm able to address the theoretical as well as ethical challenges posed by new forms of socially engaged art. iii Acknowledgements The completion of this thesis would not have been possible without the assiduous, generous and wise guidance of my supervisor, Dr Toni Ross to whom I am deeply and sincerely grateful. This thesis has been professionally edited by Dr Margaret Johnson of The Book Doctor in accordance with the IPED guidelines for editing research theses. iv Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................. ii Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1 Origin of the research ...................................................................................................... 1 Subject and purpose ........................................................................................................ 3 Preliminary assumptions ................................................................................................. 7 Interpretive approach .................................................................................................... 10 Structure ........................................................................................................................ 14 Terminology ................................................................................................................... 23 One: Sensus communis.................................................................................................... 24 The third Critique and the ‘great divide’: Danto and de Duve ...................................... 37 Danto ............................................................................................................................. 40 De Duve .......................................................................................................................... 45 Two: Aesthetics, subjectivity and democracy ................................................................. 57 Luc Ferry’s Homo Aestheticus ........................................................................................ 57 Lyotard: the community of the faculties ....................................................................... 64 Rancière: the ‘distribution of the sensible’ ................................................................... 77 The aesthetic regime ..................................................................................................... 82 Three: Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics ........................................................... 92 Critical reception .......................................................................................................... 107 Four: Aesthetics and the public sphere ........................................................................ 124 Dialogical aesthetics .................................................................................................... 135 Five: Institutions and Communities .............................................................................. 153 Curators and mediators ............................................................................................... 161 One Day Sculpture ....................................................................................................... 166 Six: Aesthetics and Community: Toward a New Paradigm? ......................................... 182 Living as Form .............................................................................................................. 183 The Art of Participation ............................................................................................... 188 The One and the Many ................................................................................................ 192 Artificial Hells ............................................................................................................... 204 Indeterminacy, concealment and engagement ........................................................... 211 Conclusion: Openness, indeterminacy and engagement ............................................. 223 Works Cited ................................................................................................................... 231 v Introduction Origin of the research This research emerged from a reflection on issues I have encountered during my work as a curator and initiator of participatory art projects developed in response to specific sites and communities in Australia. The issues central to this study concern the way in which participatory practices are critically evaluated and theorised; hence, my purpose is less to discuss specific artworks or individual artists than to examine the relationship between key ideas and assumptions that underlie theoretical debates that are directly or indirectly relevant to this field of practice. It is a research project about what people say and write more than about what people do. I should clarify from the onset that my use of the term ‘participatory art’ is very broad, so that other labels could be used in its place, such as ‘relational aesthetics’, ‘dialogical art’, ‘social practice’ or many other more or less felicitous monikers. Of course a case can be made, and has been made, that these terms identify different, albeit related, ways of making art, but this is irrelevant to my research, because my intention is not to tweak existing art historical taxonomies but to look at the conceptual interplay between the assumptions that underpin them. As I will demonstrate, these basic assumptions and presuppositions
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