Metropolis M Books For over a decade now, the debate on art has been dominated by the rhetoric of re- Experimental search. However, does the concept of artistic research still express its originally radical and experimental power today? The concept seems to have become hackneyed and ob- scured by method fever and academic jargon. Perhaps the time has come to invigorate its conceptual framework – for example through terminology referring to its compa- nion in art, namely philosophy’s branch of aesthetics. Could experimental and specu- lative processes of thought again be leading in aesthetic debates and contemporary art? These are the issues that come to the fore in this publication through a series of projects, views, and perspectives connect- ed to the project Aesthetic Jam – part of the 9th Tapei Biennial.

with Andre Alves, Boris Groys, Chus Martínez, Clodagh Emoe, Henk Slager, Metropolis M Books, PO Box 19263, NL 3501 DG Utrecht Hongjohn Lin, Irene Kopelman, John Rajchman, Lonnie van Brummelen & www.metropolism.com Siebren de Haan, Mick Wilson, and ISBN 978-90-818302-4-9 Timotheus Vermeulen EN Metropolis M Books Experimental Aesthetics

Editorial p. 2 Aesthetic of the Impasse p. 4 Andre Alves On Aestheticization p. 6 Boris Groys Aesthetic Consciousness p. 10 Chus Martinez Performing Philosphy in a p. 14 Non–Philosophical Way Clodagh Emoe Stop Making the Sensible p. 18 Hongjohn Lin Workstation p. 20 Irene Kopelman Experimental Aesthetics p. 24 A Short Story of Thinking in Art John Rajchman Drifting Studio Practice p. 30 Lonnie Van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan An Anachronistic Aesthesis p. 34 The inedible following upon the unspeakable Mick Wilson Aesthetics and the “as if ” p. 42 Timotheus Vermeulen *

* Irene Kopelman, Workstation, Aesthetic Jam, Taipei Biennial, 2014 Experimental Aesthetics profound focus on method and knowledge production is at risk of losing sight of the role of critical judgment – after all a core Editorial concept in Kantian aesthetics. Specifically, the unique character of the aesthetic judgment – offering a critical mirror Today, both the practice and reflecting both the judgment and how understanding of artistic research are it comes into being – makes clear that the encompassed by increasingly rigidifying aesthetic as such represents a dimension forms of academization. This asks for preceding a transparent methodology a thorough conceptual reassessment of and an epistemological result. Therefore, that originally artistic field. Indeed, many the aesthetic process requires a manner of questions have been lurking in the wings judgment that is capable of prolonging for some time now. Does the present the gap between aesthetic apprehension conceptual impact of artistic research still and methodological deduction so that cover its original and radical drive? any claim to knowledge could be delayed Is artistic research still related to processes as a “not yet.” of experimental thinking and creating? The very issues of aesthetics and Or does a pervasive institutionalization productive delay of knowledge were at urge to reset the ever-narrowing framework the core of the project Joyful Wisdom of artistic research? (Parallel Event Istanbul Biennale 2013).2 The present publication intends to In line with Nietzsche’s Gaya Scienza, explore topical potentialities of an alter- essayistic presentations of eight artistic native and more strategic manner of dealing situation-based thinking processes with artistic practices. Therefore, the texts continued the quest for an aesthetics that deliberately refer again to the concept hovers on the border of judgment and of aesthetics. Since contemporary thinkers affect in an attempt to be liberated from such as Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière the freezing order of academic knowledge. have initiated to redefine the aesthetic The potential of a radical choice loomed domain, aesthetics seems once again up, foreboding the course of being to point to extra-territorial frameworks adrift to the point of a black out of the able to avoid the production of instrument- senses, an epistemic guerilla, and making alizing concepts. Indeed, a topical an untimely plea for speculative and understanding of aesthetics appears to be symbolic forms of understanding. astoundingly compatible with what was Aesthetic Jam, the concluding project once advocated by artistic research, i.e. in this series3, is part of the 9th Taipei the self-reflexive and self-critical capacities Biennial (2014) and connects to Nicolas of artists engaging in configurations of Bourriaud’s curatorial concept of understanding and signification. The Great Acceleration. The concept of In light of a topical reconsideration great acceleration points here to the urge of the aesthetic regime, a first exploration of a global refoundation of the notion took place during the project The Judgment of aesthetics deploying various topical is the Mirror (Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, perspectives such as antroposcene, object- 2013)1. In particular, attention was drawn oriented ontology, and new materialism. to how the current artistic discourse and its Yet, Aesthetic Jam also stresses the bond

1 The Judgment is the Mirror took place in 2 Joyful Wisdom took place as parallel event the Living Art Museum Reykjavik (as an exhibition) of the 13th Istanbul Biennale in Rezan Has Museum and the Iceland Academy of the Art (as a seminar) (as an exhibition) and Kadir Has University (as a from January 19 until March 24, 2013. Participants: seminar) from September 13 until October 20, 2013. 2 Tiong Ang, Clodagh Emoe, Jan Kaila, Jaapo Knuutila, Participants: Tiong Ang, Lonnie van Brummelen & Roger Palmer, Henk Slager (curator), and Mick Siebren de Haan, Burak Delier, Jan Kaila, Aglaia Wilson. Konrad, Marion von Osten, Henk Slager (curator), Jalal Toufic, and Mick Wilson. between aesthetics and experimental pro- cesses of making art. A zero-degree exhibition plan developed by co-curators Hongjohn Lin and Henk Slager4 hosted a relay-type series of three production periods and additional presentation moments. Participating artists not only produced new work, but also continuously engaged in adaptation of the display system and public discussions of the material conditions and relevant conceptual frame- works of both the exhibition and their art making for Aesthetic Jam. As an elaboration on aforementioned research projects, a publication has been developed in collaboration with Metro- polis M Books. Deriving from a multitude of perspectives and lines of thought, this publication intends to question anew the concept of aesthetics and its relevant positions and situations. Could a novel concept of aesthetics reveal different forms of interest in and processes of artistic thinking? Could experimental aesthetics as an undisciplinary methodology dis- tinctive from a theoretical and academic philosophy be in the forefront of artistic practices? Could the concept of aesthetics have the power to reframe the concept of artistic research? A number of Aesthetic Jam participants such as Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Irene Kopelman, Hongjohn Lin, Mick Wilson, Andre Alves, and Clodagh Emoe delve into their art making and the questions stated above. In addition, the publication contains contextualizing texts by authors known for their criti- cal reflections on the topical impact of aesthetics such as Boris Groys, Chus Martínez, John Rajchman, Henk Slager, Timotheus Vermeulen.

Henk Slager, Editor

3 Aesthetic Jam (co-curators Hongjohn Lin and 4 The zero-degree composition is made up of Henk Slager, Editor) took place as a satellite project two installative presentations: Lonnie van Brummelen of the 9th Taipei Biennial (curator Nicolas Bourriaud), and Siebren de Haan’s Episode of the Sea and Kai Taipei Fine Arts Museum/Taipei National University Huang Chen’s Sea Route. Both works articulate of the Arts, September 12, 2014 through January 4, the current situation of aesthetics metaphorically: 2015. Participants: Andre Alves, Tiong Ang, the obsoleteness of a chosen course, the romanticism Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Chang of isolation, the unbearableness of island Nai-Wen, Clodagh Emoe, Fang Yen-Hsiang, James consciousness, and the pressing necessity of a 3 T. Hong, Huang Chien-Hung, Kai Huang Chen, complete reformulation based on novel perspectives Irene Kopelman, Alejandro Ramirez, Su Meng-hung, and experimentations. Gwen Wang, Wang Sheng-Hung, Mick Wilson, and Wu Shu-ann.

Aesthetic of the Impasse idea of reality relies on the potential for change – a contingency that allows for the actualization of that potential, Andre Alves the novel. But in the current contemporary she identifies a tension between that which seems to be possible and the role of It is not a vision – it can be found in uncertainty as openness: “the prisons of any newspaper: the contemporary everyday the possible... invade and monopolize our is held by a sensation of non-resolution relation with the world every time we feel and lacks prospects for other worlds. that ‘everything is possible... but we cannot In the worst case, this is not some sort of do anything else (besides choosing)’ daydream but the manifestation of having and that ‘everything can be said... but one become paranoid without realizing the has nothing relevant to add.”1 splits between different realities. In the The crisis of imagination is not brought best case, it is the advertisement about so much by the lack of potential of an articulation of reality sustained by to produce alternatives (because every- ambiguity and impotence in the name of thing seems to be possible, at least in the economic austerity, the common good, and eyes of capital exchange) as by the evidence political discipline – and with the capacity that one’s alternatives have no capacity to get rid of any sense of radicalism, to shift the sensed contemporary. There personal and social potency, and mental seems to be a hegemonic voracity regarding balance. the present, a manifestation of the desire The contemporary everyday results to normalize subjectivity by controlling from a set of temporary exchanges the mechanisms inherent to political mobi- articulating contingent practices, while lization (from territory planning to maintaining the social and the political currency control) and subjective percep- essentially unstable. However, today tions (from interfering with personal the contemporary seems to be trapped aspirations, localization of the individual in a play of ambiguity not performing in the possibility of the present and his the potential openness of the unstable, own future, and so on). Such a teleology but rather leading to setting-up the without purpose struggles with the possi- instable; one that will simply not wear bility of artistic endeavors, since the artistic off. This is basically the outcome of a attitude is necessarily a founding one. repetitious political lexicon as a sort of It dismisses that there is a decision linguistic pathology following a dialectic to follow; decisions are the most funda- of negativity: influence, trump, legislate, mental aspect of the aesthetic. For dominate, surround, crisis, austerity, the subjective of the individual, discipline, future, lack, solution... it is not much different. Such an instability is a manifestation If one lives under a sensation of of the crisis in political imagination, inoperability, of “no alternatives left,” then, in our creative impotency. The sensation in the world of unlimited reproduction – of uncertainty gives rise to what Marina as Nicolas Bourriaud puts it – subjects are Garcés calls the “prisons of the possible”: left to live under the sign of permanent an arrest of the imagination of other others exile.2 The exile starts with the model in the world, or even other worlds – of contemporary participation dominated at least ones that are not the world of the by a shared currency of capital and techno- excluded. According to Garcés, the very logy. Colectivo Situaciones 3 saw in this

4 1 Marina Garcés, En las Prisiones de lo Posible, 2 According to Nicolas Bourriaud, Barcelona, 2002, p.15 (my translation). The Radicant, New York, 2009, p. 42. the dilemma of our present: on the one connected to an impasse no longer denotes hand the profound subjective disquiet of a dead-end (street). It rather designates choice, on the other, something perceived an inward-turned energy imploding as a terrifying and constant attempt of the layers of personality, where the obvious normalization of the counter-system that ceases to be clear through a timely process excludes us (in Situaciones’ original idea, that should be perceived as a transition, from a political governance angle). This as the internal event taking place in contemporary attitude can be interpreted people’s minds as they go through change. as an aesthetic of the impasse: a present The impasse is a haunting force generated lacking potential actuality. That is, the by the individual to indicate an area of capacity and incapacity to use the disquiet, discomfort. It signals a lack of resolution to profit from contingency, to imagine and understating of direction. possibilities without being immediately However, despite being a jam in subdued by the belief that they will not direction, the impasse is also carried by effect any transformation. a sense of motion, one that the individual The word impasse has become par- must go through in order to produce ticularly popular in contemporary politics change. This is somewhat uncanny, to describe a state of apparent non- since it is generated by individuals and resolution, where nothing can be altered. feels to them as an external force. The The surprise is that the impasse understanding being enacted in political is treated by media and politics as a sort discourse is similar to this sense of external of external entity; as a logic unfolding force that commands our directions. from the exterior of society, as a haunting But although the term is employed in shadow that excuses responsibility, such discourses in ways meant to imprint henceforth allowing all sorts of decisions – this idea, it is worth noting too that the violence, disrespect, and negation of similarity ends there. For Perls (and Gestalt the other. Therapy), the understanding of what Yet, something is in motion in one is shying away from is a necessary the contemporary and the transformation step for transformation – to embody, to of how the word impasse is employed exaggerate it, until it forces one to realize signals it. The term impasse was born its intention. This process is also different from Voltaire’s literary beautification of from change, which can fall on you the term cul-de-sac: dead-end street. It by force or fate or even random choice; results from the contraction of im + passer, it implicates one as accountable for the or not to pass. The use of the term impasse realization of a decision. in present politics pursues that original Then, here, one finds a discursive gaffe dead-end street metaphor. In our days, or a missed encounter, since art, psycho- this (originally architectonic) terminology logy, media-speech and politics all express is more commonly known for expressing and perceive the impasse in different ways. situations and subjective psychological This mismatch of ideas plays an important states – accomplishing Simmel’s prognosis role in the nebulous effect of our per- on the expansion of the lexicon of ceptions: we use the same words but engage the metropolis as a definer for the nature in different conversations. It is not only a of spirit.4 A shift happened under Fritz situation of ambiguity and deep hesitation; Perls, who has listed the impasse as a it is one of unashamed dyslexia.Words psychological state of neurosis. From then know things; they carry a history of proven on, the impossibility of acting and judging effectiveness, and the delivered use of a

3 According to Colectivo Situaciones (2009), 4 Georg Simmel, The metropolis and the mental 5 Disquiet in the impasse. life. E-source: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ content/bpl_images/content_store/sample_chap- ter/0631225137/bridge.pdf word mobilizes metaphors that open On Aestheticization up specific constructions of reality. Reclaiming this discursive manipulation, and accepting that there are advantages Boris Groys in the existential disquiet (rather than being subdued by it) inverses the manipulation of language but also evokes In the contemporary art context the a release from a dialectics of paranoia words “aesthetics”, “aestheticism” and and consolation. “aestheticization” have mostly negative It might sound like a cliché, but artists connotations and are used as critique and do know how to put the disquiet into play accusation. Many contemporary artists and turn it into something potential. It is understand the goal of art not as not about being haunted by dread and find production of “aesthetic experience” in catharsis and consolation in making art – the soul of an aesthetically educated that would be the same consoling criteria spectator but, rather, as a means to change the political discourse acts upon; it is about the world they are living in. The shift making and giving shape to meanings, from artistic production towards art again and again, and again. Art practices activism seems to lead to a total rejection permanently offer the puzzlement of the of the aesthetic attitude. At the moment new by detecting, in the making of art, artists enter the sphere of politics how individuals relate to the materiality they tend to leave aesthetics behind them. of their time, that is, how they exist in it. The famous dictum by This puts aesthetic judgment at work weighs heavily on their minds: aesthetici- and creates continuity in the development zation of politics leads to Fascism of artistic discourses. In the aesthetic and should be opposed by politicization of disquiet, everything must be reorganized; aesthetics. But does the turn towards thinking, then, undergoes a digressive art activism necessarily mean the experience, which is not necessarily subordination of aesthetics under the a disintegrative one. What is being sold hegemony of politics? in political discourse as infectious has Now I would argue that today the always been taken in art as a cure. word aestheticization is mostly used in a Because the aesthetic force is meant confused and confusing way. One speaks for the imaginary other, it is from the about aestheticization implying different start an aperture in the intentions of and often even opposing theoretical “the prisons of the possible.” The role of and political operations. The reason for art in the era of the impasse might start this state of confusion is the division by reclaiming the impassive-unrest that of contemporary art practice itself into floods the contemporary (as once one two different domains: art in the proper recognized the need to reclaim the means sense of the word and design. In these of labor), to disintegrate the configurations two domains aestheticization means, that force the contemporary into a cliché – indeed, two different and even opposing including its own. The potential is things. Let us analyze the difference. there; if aesthetics has something to teach In the domain of design aesthetici- our contemporary politics it is how zation of certain technical tools, to regain its creative imagination – and commodities or events means an attempt that will depend on art’s pedagogical to make them more attractive, seductive, capacity. appealing to the user. In this sense we

6 should see the whole art of the pre-modern someone asks me whether I find the palace past as, actually, not art but design. If that I see before me beautiful, I may one looks at the art of ancient China one well say that I do not like that sort of thing, finds well designed tools for religious in true Rousseauesque manner I might ceremonies or everyday objects used by even vilify the vanity of the great who court functionaries and intellectuals. waste the sweat of the people on such The same can be said about the art of superfluous thing. (…) All of this might be Ancient Egypt or of the Inca empire: it is conceded to me and approved; but that not art in the modern sense of the word is not what is at issue here. One must not but design. And the same can be said be in the least biased in favor of the about the art of European old regimes existence of the thing, but must be entirely before the French revolution – here we also indifferent in this respect in order to play find only religious design or design of the judge in the matter of taste.”1 Kant power and wealth. does not like the palace as a representation Our contemporary notion of art and of wealth and power. However, he is artistic aestheticization has its roots in the ready to accept the palace as aestheticized, French revolution – in the decisions that that actually means negated, made were taken by the French revolutionary non-existent for all practical purposes – government concerning the objects that reduced to a pure form. this government inherited from the Old So since the French revolution art Regime. The change of regime – especially began to be understood as the de- a radical change such as it was introduced functionalized and publicly exhibited by the French revolution – is usually corpse of past reality. Such an under- accompanied by a wave of iconoclasm. standing of art determines the art strategies One could follow these waves in the cases until now. In the art context to aestheticize of Protestantism, Conquista or, recently, the things of the present means to discover after the fall of the Socialist regimes in their dysfunctional, absurd and unworkable Eastern . The French revolutiona- character. In other words, artistic aes- ries took a different course: instead theticization is the opposite of the of destroying sacral and profane objects aestheticization by means of design. The belonging to the Old Regime they de- goal of design is to aestheti-cally improve functionalized, or, in other words, the status quo – to make it more attractive. aestheticized them. The French revolution Art also accepts the status quo – but it turned the design of the Old Regime accepts it as a corpse, after its trans- into what we call today art, i.e. in an object formation into a mere representation. not of use but of pure contemplation. In this sense art sees contemporaneity not This violent, revolutionary act of aes- merely from a revolutionary, but, rather, theticization of the old regime created art post-revolutionary perspective. One as we know it today. Before the French can say: modern and contemporary art revo-lution there was no art – only design. see modernity and contemporaneity as the After the French revolution art emerged French revolutionaries saw the design – as death of design. of the Old Regime – as already obsolete, The revolutionary origins of aesthetics reducible to a pure form, already a corpse. were conceptualized by in Actually, it is especially true for artists his Critique of the Power of Judgment. Almost of the avant-garde who are often mistaken- at the beginning of this text Kant makes ly interpreted as heralds of the new techno- clear its political context. He writes: “If logical world – as marching in the avant-

7 1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Paul Guyer (Ed.), Cambridge University Press, 2000, p.90–91. garde of technological progress. Nothing is I will not dwell too long on this figure further from the historical truth. Of course, of the return to the mother womb and to artists of the historical avant-garde were the nurse’s breasts after a frenetic ride interested in a technological, industrialized in a car towards death – it is all sufficiently modernity. However, they were interested obvious. Here it is enough to say that in technological modernity only with Marinetti and his friends were fished out the goal to aestheticize modernity, to de- of the ditch by a group of fishermen and, functionalize it, to demonstrate the as he writes, “some gouty old naturalists” ideology of progress as phantasmal and – that means by the same passeists against absurd. When one speaks about the avant- which the Manifesto is directed. Thus, garde in its relationship to technology one the Manifesto is introduced by the has mostly one historical figure in mind: description of a failure of its own program. Tommaso Marinetti and his Futurist Mani- And so one does not wonder that the text festo that was published on the first page of fragment that concludes the Manifest the newspaper Figaro in 1909.2 The text repeats the figure of defeat. Following the condemned the “passeistic” cultural taste logic of progress Marinetti envisions of the bourgeoisie and celebrated the the coming of a new generation for which beauty of the new industrial civilization he and his friends will appear, in their (“a roaring motorcar, which seems to race turn, as the hated passeists that should be on like machine-gun fire is more beautiful destroyed. But he writes that when the than the Winged Victory of Samothrace”), agents of this coming generation will try to glorified war as “hygiene of the world,” and destroy him and his friends they will find wished “to destroy museums, libraries and them “on a winter’s night in a humble academies of any sort.” The identification shed, far away in the country with an with the ideology of progress seems here incessant rain drumming upon us – and to be complete. However, Marinetti did not warming our hands around the flickering publish the text of the Futurist Manifesto flames of our present-day books.” in isolation, but included it inside a story These passages show that for Marinetti that begins with a description of how to aestheticize a technologically driven he interrupted a long, nightly conversation modernity does not mean to glorify it with his friends about poetry with a call or trying to improve it, to make it more to stand up and drive far away in a fast car. efficient by means of a better design. And so they did. Marinetti writes: “And Quite the contrary, from the beginning of we, like young lions chased after Death… his artistic carrier Marinetti looks at Nothing at all worth dying for, other than modernity in retrospective, as if it has the desire to divest ourselves finally of already collapsed, as if it already has the courage that weighed us down.” become a thing of the past – imagining And the divestment took place. Marinetti himself in the ditch of History or, at describes the nocturnal ride further: best, sitting in the countryside under the “How ridiculous! What a nuisance!… post-apocalyptic, incessant rain. Marinetti I braked hard and to my disgust the wheels envisions the failure of his own project – left the ground and I flew into the ditch… but this failure is understood by him as a O mother of a ditch, brimful with muddy failure of progress itself that leaves water. How I relished your strength-giving behind only debris, ruins and personal sludge that reminded me so much of catastrophes. the saintly black breasts of my Sudanese Now, I quoted Marinetti at some nurse.” length because it is precisely Marinetti

2 F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Foundation and Manifesto 4 Walter Benjamin, ‘Ueber den Begriff der of Futurism’, in: Critical Writings, Farrar, Strauss and Geschichte’, in: Gesammelte Schriften, 1:2, Suhrkamp Giroux, New York, 2006, p.11–17. Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1974. 8 3 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in: Illuminations, London, 1992. whom Benjamin calls the crucial witness Of course, Benjamin’s analysis of when in the Afterword to his famous essay Marinetti’s rhetoric is correct. There is about the artwork in the age of its mecha- only one but crucial question here: how nical reproducibility Benjamin formulates reliable is Marinetti as a witness? Mari- his critique of the aestheticization of netti’s Fascism is an already aestheticized politics as the Fascist undertaking par Fascism – Fascism understood as a excellence.3 To make his point Benjamin heroic acceptance of defeat and death. cites a later text by Marinetti on the Real Fascism wanted, of course, not defeat Ethiopian war, in which Marinetti draws but victory. Actually, in the late 1920s parallels between the modern war opera- and 1930s, Marinetti became less and less tions and poetic and artistic operations influential inside the Italian Fascist that were used by the Futurist artists and movement that practiced precisely not famously speaks “about the metallization the aestheticization of politics but the of the human body” – metallization politicization of aesthetics by using that has only one meaning: death of this Novecento and Neo-Classicism and, yes, body turning it into a corpse understood also Futurism for its political goals – or, as an art object. Benjamin interprets this we can say, for its political design. In fact, text as a proclamation of war by art against the figure of Angelus Novus as it was life and summarizes the Fascist political described by Benjamin reminds one of program by the words: fiat art – pereas Marinetti – even if Benjamin himself re- mundi. And Benjamin writes further that fers here to an image by Klee.4 Benjamin Fascism is the fulfillment of the l’art describes, namely, Angelus Novus as pour l’art movement. driven by the wind of progress towards the

9 * Exhibition view Joyful Wisdom, Rezan Has Museum. Istanbul. Aglaia Konrad, Iconocopycity, 2013. Jalal Toufic, Vertiginous Variations on Guilt and Innocence Witnessed in 39 Steps through the Rear Window, mixed media, 2013 future, but turning his back to the future Aesthetic Consciousness and looking into the past unfolding under his gaze – progress presents itself to this backward directed gaze as a work of Chus Martínez destruction and devastation. Thus, the aestheticization of the present condition is not the celebration of 1 it but rather a manifestation of the deepest I would like to start by reproducing possible distrust in its sustainability, in the definition of “aesthetic” given by the its potential of historical survival – to a Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy: degree that the artist does not even try “Introduced into the philosophical lexicon to improve this condition. By aesthetical during the 18th century, the term aesthetic de-functionalization of the status quo, has come to be used to designate, among art prefigures its coming revolutionary other things, a kind of object, a kind overturn. Or a new global war. Or a new of judgment, a kind of attitude, a kind of global catastrophe. In any case an event experience, and a kind of value. For the that will make the whole contemporary most part, aesthetic theories have divided culture, including all its aspirations, over questions particular to one or projections and alternatives obsolete – as another of these designations: whether the French revolution made obsolete all artworks are necessarily aesthetic objects; the aspirations, intellectual projections how to square the allegedly perceptual and Utopias of the Old Regime. basis of aesthetic judgments with the fact By practicing the politicization of that we give reasons in support of them; art, contemporary art activism cannot how best to capture the elusive contrast escape a much more radical, revolutionary between an aesthetic attitude and a tradition of aestheticization of politics practical one; whether to define aesthetic – the acceptance of one’s own failure experience according to its phenomen- understood as a premonition and ological or representational content; how prefiguration of the coming failure of the best to understand the relation between status quo in its totality that will leave aesthetic value and aesthetic experience. no room for its possible improvement or But questions of more general nature have correction. In fact, in our contemporary lately arisen, and these have tended to world only art indicates the possibility of have a skeptical cast: whether any use of a revolution as a radical change beyond aesthetic may be explicated without appeal the horizon of all our present desires and to some other; whether agreement expectations. respecting any use is sufficient to ground meaningful theoretical agreement or disagreement; whether the term ultimately answers to any legitimate philosophical purpose that justifies its inclusion in the lexicon. The skepticism expressed by such general questions did not begin to take hold until the later part of the 20th century, and this fact prompts the question whether (a) the concept of the aesthetic is in- herently problematic and it is only recently that we have managed to see that it is, or

10 (b) the concept is fine and it is only them. Traditionally art theory depends recently that we have become muddled very much on those dualistic explanatory enough to imagine otherwise. Adjudicating models. Art and some “parts” of nature between these possibilities requires a are understood as having rare physical vantage from which to take in both early properties that play a causal role in the and late theorizing on aesthetic matters.”1 mind perception. Those properties trigger the lucky correspondence between 2 what is outside and what we sense as How to regain a notion of aesthetic as “inside.” My argument rests on the claim a useful one in the current debate that these properties cannot be known, around artistic research? True, the term neither through perception nor through aesthetic does refer to a relationship introspection. However, that does not with experience and to the possibility of rule out the possibility that they might be gaining a consensus on how certain types known. of objects – and later non-objects – are at the origin of that particular experience. 3 However, I cannot think of this term In searching for a concept, what we do is without its very precise historical life in art look for a better, more complex way to and art theory contexts – even if expanding define a problem. Artistic research means its meaning may be interesting; even many things at once. It would take too if pointing to other terms and therefore long to discuss two terms separately. It is problems concerning experience, worthwhile, though, to devote some time knowledge, and thinking in relation to to describing the nature of the ambition art may be equally important. that married the two terms. Artistic used Is it still productive to consider the as an adjective is already a strange and aesthetic a valid concept pointing to the tricky notion. In the coupling of terms, “processes of understanding signi- it is unclear whether research happens fication”? And if so, how? The term, even in a playful, non-structured way or that it taken in a more experimental, expanded is at the core of doing of art. Too many or redefined way, refers to the experience times artistic research entails an ideo- we do find in what we call the “I”. The logical statement. That is, even if common “I” being a human or a bat, I am not going sense says art happens first and foremost to make any distinction here, since it in the realm of the unconscious, it is is possible to imagine that all animate still considered research, thus, a conscious matter could possess a sense of the I, even pursuit towards an “engagement with without a language to tell us about it. processes of understanding signification.” However, my first reservation pertains to Artistic research comes to be, then, a the confidence the term aesthetic implies: statement about a very particular type of a very compelling trust in the cause-effect thinking, isolating the two cases “thinking relationship between the mind and the in art” and “thinking through art.” outside-the-mind situation. It is difficult Furthermore, in being made a first cousin to think about the term aesthetic without to the aesthetic, the term artistic research implying a dualistic model of mind implies that such a particular case study in and nature and the “lucky” psychophysical “thinking” also produces a particular laws enabling the happy connection experience with an “I”. In my opinion, between certain types of objects/circum- that emphasis in artistic research just stances and the experience we have of stresses once more the historical problem

1 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-concept/ 11 of coming to terms with the mind-object notion of aesthetic. Aesthetic is the issue. The mind cannot consciously create name philosophy gave to a problem that the object that produces an experience corresponds to the philosophy of mind, to escaping any straightforward decision- the question of how experience generates making process able to be replicated with thinking and how art – its making and the same effect by anyone. Only artists are its understanding – like no other realm capable of producing art. Therefore, the embodies the incredibly deep complexity type of consciousness that produces art of the relationship between thinking/ cannot be followed or easily be explained sensing/feeling. Artistic research as a term as an intention to produce an effect. Self- is a bricolage not used to point to art as reflectivity and signification is reached thinking, but to indicate our impossibility unintentionally. Whether art addresses of grasping how art is thinking. Both terms politics or issues of form or material, the express the need for more, for a language aesthetic – more than political or cultural capable of new ways of addressing theory – defines the kind of processes that art’s contribution to knowledge of a happen in the minds of viewers and in mind active in the non-human realm; for their experience of works of art. If a logic that will bring us to understand consciousness is what we call thinking, we social and political philosophies – not in need to explain how thinking happens in rehearsing inherited terms and theoretical art, assuming that art is not a conscious apparatuses but by venturing new ones as decision everyone can make. Michael Serres or Alain Badiou do. The term artistic research could be confusing in its similitude to academic 4 research. However, such a misunder- The issue of knowledge and thought standing could also produce an interesting both in our mind and in matter is so awareness of what is proposed by the complex that it leads to a sort of creative expression of artistic research. As a pan psyche. It even assumes a level of conceptual diptych, it does not create a consciousness in matter. I have stated once compromise between its specific terms. that to inquire into knowledge implies the More than anything, it “entertains” a effort to formulate – through logic and paradox: the possibility of a non-deliberate languages that surpass disciplines – how system or discipline at the core of a inextricable relations are possible among deliberate one. “Research” here does not things, language, matter, form, and sense. indicate the embodiment of any particular It means to account for terms, possi- form of academic training, but the bilities, and circumstances where gesture of placing a “maybe” at the heart principles occur that associate animate of the real. This causes something very with inanimate, objects with memory, simple to occur: knowledge vacillates. A animals with other animals, seeds with art, permanent oscillation between positioning theory with the logic of politics, poetry us here – isolating some features of the with knowledge. Then it cannot come as a real, performing representation, giving surprise that imagination is a central form to matter – and, at the same time, principle in inventing knowledge that takes taking us faraway from the present place in art – a task that does not mimic time. That is how I understand “artistic an activity of academia, but one that, in an research.” For me the term “artistic excessive and subversive way, produces research” is a composition that designates time and space for it while constituting a a temporary solution – and so does the new “culture.” The main trait of fiction

12 and imagination is their potential failure. unable to fully understand consciousness They do not serve as solid ground for a when departing from physical states. speech act; they are an interference in the Traditional notions of aesthetic experience logic of an intentional assertion of all have an epistemic basis – and I would meaning. Art has retained the inversion say that aesthetic experience as used of the relationship between meaning and today in art contexts very much depends saying as a way to overcome the traps on that. They all assume a gap between of consciousness as the transcendental the real and the mind, between physical principle that rules the modern and phenomenological “truths.” conception of the individual defining the In other words, they all seem to derive political as an unambiguous text marked from a Cartesian way of presenting by intention of meaning and able to the divide between anima and non-anima produce and reproduce a very definite realms. The aesthetic paradigm is still a sense of empathy. reductionist one. The exercise of accepting the riddle Consciousness is connected to the of ambiguity, the constant alteration of the human mind, a mind affected by the real, relations between matter and words, time a real that does not possess any form and meaning, requires a research manner of consciousness. The aesthetic depends that calls for a radical reconsideration on a materialistic way of reading the of the role of language, of straightforward relationship between human and nature. conceptions of how things interact, It is hard to believe how materialism as well as an inventory of monologues can still be held as a true way of presenting produced by serious forms of meaning. human versus nature or explaining a particular case in experience – but 5 materialism must be true since alternatives The notion “consciousness” is used in are unacceptable. Thus, we should many different ways. It is sometimes used dedicate our research efforts to produce for the capacity to discriminate between alternatives for preeminent worldviews – stimuli, to report information, to monitor not only affecting how we read art and its internal states, or to control behavior. effects, but also able to transform tra- We can think of these phenomena as posing ditional ways of understanding experience, the “easy problems” of consciousness. art, and politics. In principle, there seems to be no profound As argued above, we have good reason problem in assuming that a physical to believe that consciousness has a fun- system could be “conscious” in the senses damental place in nature. In light of and there is no obvious obstacle to an all relevant philosophical and scientific eventual explanation of these phenomena developments, we need to explore in neurobiological or computational sense. how this may trigger a new science for But how and why do physical processes thinking about art and art’s thinking give rise to experience? Why do physical together with a new set of terms and logic processes not take place “in the dark,” – only then can we proceed, from a without any accompanying awareness of point of view of an “art-I” rather than experience? That is the central mystery of merely a “human-I”, to discover a truly consciousness. new way of being part of art. However, not all we know about consciousness is deducible from physical phenomena. Therefore, we will always be

13 Performing Philosophy in has problematized aesthetics, Osborne a Non-Philosophical Way perceives an “ineliminable” bind between the two domains.1 The interrogative practices of the late 1960s that informed Clodagh Emoe and extended the horizon of contemporary art consider this bind contentious, but nevertheless present. All in all, Osborne Generally, aesthetics is understood as observes a “resurgence of interest in philosophy’s discourse of art. Since the explicitly philosophical discourses about role of philosophy is that of interpretation, art over the last decade” played out in the such a reading of aesthetics designates discursive space of contemporary art.2 philosophy as external to art. That That interest is underscored by philo- also privileges philosophy as the bearer sopher Alain Badiou in his Handbook of meaning and accordingly the site of Inaesthetics.3 Badiou argues that a crisis for thought. As a post-conceptual artist, of the homogenization of cultural forms of my artistic practice complicates such representation and a loss of political a general, conventional understanding of agency and its investigative approach posit aesthetics because my practice presents once more the issue of aesthetics for an alternative engagement with art and contemporary art. Although he positions philosophy. In my work, philosophy does the concept of inaesthetics as a departure not fulfil a role of interpretation, but is from aesthetics, I approach inaesthetics performed throughout the entire process as providing a new form of aesthetic of art making. To further complicate enquiry in contemporary art because it matters, as artworks emerge out of my asserts art’s primacy over thought. For me, sustained engagement with philosophical inaesthetics re-engages with the discourse enquiry it is impossible to completely of aesthetics while at the same time separate the two domains. Since taking part in the thinking that takes place philosophy is internal rather than external within contemporary art practice. My to my artistic practice, one could argue understanding that inaesthetics expands that my artworks demonstrate a the aesthetic discourse is also advanced by “philosophical character.” Instead of philosopher Jacques Rancière, who claims, considering philosophy a resource for art, “Even as it tries to ward off aesthetics, it is precisely the relationship between art perhaps inaesthetics thereby enters into and philosophy that activates me to think. a new dialogue with it.” Inaesthetics is The process of engaging with philo- unavoidably situated within the discursive sophical ideas through an art practice field of aesthetics because it puts, as modifies the general reading of aesthetics Rancière observes, aesthetics “back into further while demonstrating that thought play, if not into question, the operations is not confined to the domain of philo- through which it sought to challenge sophy but also takes place in and through the logic of the aesthetic regime of the the domain of art. arts.”4 In line with Rancière, I assume that Philosopher Peter Osborne argues that inaesthetics is not a complete departure contemporary art has a “philosophical from aesthetics as a genre of philosophy, character.” Although contemporary art but offers a new aesthetic framework that

1 Peter Osborne, Art Beyond Aesthetics, 2 Peter Osborne, Art Beyond Aesthetics, p. 8. Philosophical Criticism, in: Art History and Contemporary Art, Special Issue: 3 Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, ed. Art-History-Visual Culture, March 2004, p. 27. Werner Hamacher, trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford University Press, 2005.

14 4 Jacques Rancière, ‘Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics,’ in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward, London/ New York, 2004, p. 231. overcomes the impasse of the contentious lecture were mediated. Critchley’s lecture bind between aesthetics and contemporary “Mystical Anarchism” recalls the art. Movement of the Free Spirit, a group of Consequently, inaesthetics presents a thirteenth century mystics, focusing more relevant form of aesthetic enquiry on mystic Marguerite Porete and her for my practice and for contemporary art peculiar handbook The Mirror of Simple in general. Moreover, it has the critical and Annihilated Souls (and Who Remain resources that previous forms of aesthetics Only in Wanting and Desire of Love). This lack in dealing with the condition of handbook led to Porete’s charge of thought in art. Badiou outlines how he heresy in 1310 and her refusal to disavow conceives thought in art by repositioning the message of her handbook led to her the locus of truth from the privileged execution at the stake. In his lecture, realm of philosophy to art. In composing Critchley recounts the seven stages that a new schema between art and philosophy, Porete maintained necessary to annihilate inaesthetics presents a non-hierarchical the soul and bring about a transcendental symbiotic relation between the two encounter with the divine. He describes disciplines. This is because inaesthetics this process as both mystical and “makes no claim to turn art into an object anarchistic because the internalization of for philosophy.”5 Instead, philosophy can religious authority these mystics practiced reveal the specific form of thought that is effectively undermines the hierarchies of immanent to art, Badiou claims. the Church and, by extrapolation, the For me as an artist, inaesthetics State. In addition, he observes the political provides the critical tools to consider how implications of the process of self- philosophical meaning is implicated in my deification, outlining how this process works by allowing me to explore how captures the ethos of the Movement of the art offers a way to think about Free Spirit by presenting the self as a philosophical ideas in a non-philosophical “dividual.” When the spirit is free “all way. Thus, inaesthetics provides a frame- conceptions of mine and thine vanish.”6 work to reflect on the thinking that is Critchley assumes that the transformation potentially raised by, or better put, invited of the individual to a dividual subject by the event-based work Mystical Anarchism. would enable more socially bound forms Mystical Anarchism emerged out of my of collectivity articulating the tenets of the interest for philosophical enquiry. Movement of the Free Spirit as offering a The work that I developed in collaboration new way of being in the world that adheres with philosopher Simon Critchley was to notions of freedom and equality. enacted for the first time in Glendalough Where the lecture “Mystical Anar- in August, 2009. Mystical Anarchism chism” explores the potential of the not only encompasses the original event collective to forge new states of being in in Glendalough; it also includes the the world and consequently new ways production of a film in 2011, and a series of of thinking about the world, the enactment events centered on the screening of the of the lecture sought to furnish a space film in 2012. In this text, I will focus on the where a group could come together and first event centered on an intimate lecture. potentially engage with the ideas arti- Although a lecture might seem a culated in Critchley’s lecture more directly, conventional way of relaying philosophical on an experiential level. The project ideas, the enactment of the work played a Mystical Anarchism sought to engender an crucial role in how the ideas within this interplay between the content of Critchley’s

15 5 Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 6 Critchley’s paper ‘Mystical Anarchism’ Epigraph. was subsequently published as a chapter in The Faith of the Faithless, in Political Theology, London/New York, 2012, pp. 103–151. lecture with the context of the event, hermit monk who resided on the banks of extending philosophical enquiry to others the upper lake. St. Kevin’s mendicant in a nuanced way by creating an other space lifestyle reflects that of mystic Marguerite where thinking might be “felt” or per- Porete’s and The Movement of the Free ceived. Through a process that I define as Spirit. At midnight, the site of Glenda- staging, the performance of philosophy lough turns into a mysterious, impenetrable that is explicit in Critchley’s lecture site that would attract mystics. Enacting becomes implicated through its enactment. the event at midnight was a gesture towards In the enactment of “Mystical the element of secrecy surrounding the Anarchism,” the method of assembly esoteric text that led to Porete’s execution. is initiated from the onset by the hand- Midnight is a significant time, often delivered invitation to participate. understood as a time of potential, a time The journey to an unknown location, when we might think differently.8 the gathering in a clearing of a forest on a Although as an artist I engage with large hand-mat of 17 x 7 metres in near philosophical questions, I observe that the darkness further embeds the content of way of thinking that unfolds through my Critchley’s lecture. The method enhances artistic practice and also unfolds out the experiential aspect and informs the of works such as Mystical Anarchism is not symbolic reading of the work. By enacting analogous to the form of thought instituted in a space where a group could be by conventional methods of philosophy. gathering together for a discrete period My practice activates me to think, but in of time, Critchley’s philosophical ideas on ways that differ from an abstracted the possibility of utopian forms of com- reflection, argumentation, and theory munity can be “felt” and engaged with in building that one would associate with an immediate and meaningful capacity. the discipline of philosophical enquiry. In The method also informs the conceptual my work, the act of thinking is bound framework of the work where my decision with experience and, therefore, affective not to seek permission from the National in nature. In this way, the processes used Parks Authority implicitly refers to the in the enactment of event-based works anarchistic attitude that Critchley presents such as Mystical Anarchism invite people to in his lecture.7 think about philosophical ideas in a non- Enacting Mystical Anarchism in a sig- philosophical way. Since inaesthetics nificant place, the banks of the Upper Lake acknowledges that thought is immanent to in Glendalough, at midnight, intensified art and inseparable from the sensible, it the experiential dimension of the event. provides the aesthetic framework to reflect The name Glendalough is derived from on the form of thought that Mystical the Irish Glenn dha Lough (the valley of the Anarchism invites. two lakes). The site is geographically significant since it has been formed by a fault line in the earth’s crust. Glendalough is also an ancient monastic settlement built around the followers of St. Kevin, a

7 The decision to not ask permission 8 Badiou’s peer Jacques Rancière also observes from the state authorities was also a practical the potential of nighttime in The Nights of Labour. decision. I anticipated they would refuse In this essay Rancière reflects on the auto-didactic my bringing one hundred people to the banks activities of the proletariat instrumentalising a time of the Upper Lake in Glendalough at midnight. out of time, carving out a space where they could This observation demonstrates how art institute their own subjective agency. This process can practice often necessitates the artist to operate also be registered in Irish history through the in an anarchistic manner. phenomenon of the hedge school, a secret educational 16 system that literally took place in the hedges during the late sixteenth and seventeenth century in Ireland. *

17 * Clodagh Emoe, Mystical Anarchism. Installation at The Judgement is the Mirror, Living Art Museum, Reykjavkik, 2013. Stop Making the Sensible However, knowledge of the beautiful cannot be expanded without a political price to pay. From ’s republic and its expelled Hongjohn Lin artisans, to Adorno’s conception of a standardized, industrialized culture, and Rancière’s recount of the ruling of demos, One generally assumes that aesthetics is the aesthetic paradigm, once the science of built around the discourse of the senses. the sensible, cannot be transformed without Paradoxically, since Plato, the philosophical the political and the social. Strikingly, endeavor has been to translate a visceral, the time of Baumgarten’s neologism corres- individual and subjective experience into a ponds to the nascent period of the privati- discursive practice. Aesthetics, a term zation of art as a commodity needing to coined by the German philosopher Alexan- be evaluated and valued for distribution in der Baumgarten, focuses profoundly on the pre-capitalist system – the emergence the aesthetic experience, which divides the of aesthetics was already coded with good, the bad, and the ugly from art’s politico-economic messages. Perhaps the formal properties based on perceptions and most assertive voice speaking of the impor- receptions. In an etymological sense, tance of the sensible can be found in aesthetics emphatically does not relate to Karl Marx’s statement: “The formation of the business of artists – practices, makings, the five senses is a labor of the entire history and how-to-do’s. of the world down to the present.”1 If a Taking the notion of taste into a historical, dialectical pinnacle can be broader concept, Baumgarten was boiled down to a sensible issue as Marx not shying away from giving the corporeal claims, then it comes as no surprise that pleasure a prestigious place in judging contemporary aestheticians such as the quality of art. As subjective and Badiou, Rancière, and many others, allay personal it might be, emotional responses, the sensible with the political while shifting from affection to aversion, or from pleasure the boundaries of the fixed territory of to pain, reconnect the body with the mind conventional aesthetics, which has always encompassing the conundrum of art, been a cognitive issue. The expanding which was previously solely commented and changing aesthetic domain is deemed on from the perspective of thought and to be a meta-political one; henceforth, intellect. Baumgarten’s aesthetics could be the aesthetic revelation can become revo- disdained, yet it was an attempt to free lutionary, as most from its logocentric aspects. philosophical quests postulate. First and Aesthetics stands on the muddling fore- foremost, such a political domain assumes ground where words can easily run out into the presence of readers, audiences, spec- the fusion (and confusion) of the rational tators, onlookers, and beholders. and the sensible. Aesthetics stems from the reaction of The ground of fusion where the judg- the sensible, while at the other end ment of taste stands not only distills of the line lies the action it produces. meaning from the external objects for the Nonetheless, one could surmise that ra- sensible, but also gives existential meaning dical aesthetic politics taken to an extreme to humanity. Kant and many subsequent would abolish the hierarchy among aestheticians have prescribed art as one of known artists and anonymous audiences, the indispensable solutions for human which might well be the case in some existence and its potential transcendence. practices of art. To put it bluntly, the issue

18 1 Karl Marx, The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Martin Milligan trans., Moscow: Progress P, 1959, p. 46. of the sensible is mostly considered the similar narrative. Thus, makes emancipation of the universal, speculative sense of making art, not of making receiver, not of a particular doer. sense of the sensible. In Aristotle’s time, Contemporary aesthetics never took improvisation is important to theater, the how-to-do as the subject-supposed- and no less important than dance, music, to-know. In Greek times, particularly and the wide range of art. poetics or poiesis meaning “to make” and Indeed, improvisation is an interplay “to become,” as a branch of philosophy was of associations and affiliations to create supposed to be able to transform and to something in contingency. Moreover, one reveal the world. Aristotle’s Poetics, the needs to perceive and conceive at the equivalent of Rhetoric on how to write, dealt same time, comparable to music where with how to create drama. Aristotle’s twist players are also listeners. The formal of Plato’s mimesis is to give the power structure of improvisation is always loosely of imitation back to the hands of the doers bound, off-center, and without being rather than to the philosophical inter- enclosed in deploying something anew: pretation of the receiver’s mind. In his view, the informal quality of improvisation defies to imitate and to improvise is intrinsic a fixed systematic constraint. Improvisation to human nature, as most children show in creates the situation of co-authoring – playing; for poets these two gifts are a single authorship cannot easily be con- important artistic techniques. Poetics’ claim tained. Improvisation is always a dynamic is that both tragedy and comedy originate flux, a process of making, which is in “improvisation,” literally meaning the indispensable meaning of poetic “not foreseen” and able to construct a veri- experience.

19 * Zero degree situation from Aesthetic Jam, 2014. Exhibition view, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2014. Foreground: Kai Huang Chen, Sea Route. Mixed media. Background: Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Episode of the Sea. At the Taipei Biennial 2014, the project Workstation Aesthetic Jam, curated by Henk Slager and Hongjohn Lin, creates an improvi- sation with fourteen artists and critics Irene Kopelman rendering a contemporary version of a surrealist cadavre exquis. The project title says it all: turning aesthetic experience If you are a person who likes to think, into a poetic one in three consecutive you most probably want to produce an rounds within a three-month span, invol- original thought every now and then, ving group and public discussions amidst a even though we all know that most things changing exhibition scenario. Firstly, have been said and done (and thought two works Sea Route by Chen Kai-Huang of) already. and the Episode of the Sea by Lonnie van We abandoned the idea of the genius Brummelen and Siebren de Haan are centuries ago. Still, when you sit down, installed, showing two radical situations of think, and work, you do so with the expec- islands. The former, Taiwan, isolated tation, or at least desire, of producing an by the artist’s performance connotes the original idea. The question is, how? island’s separate cultural-political identity; How can you reach for what you didn’t the latter, Urk, demonstrates how know already? everything changed since the island’s Most of us know our strengths and connection to the mainland. Starting from weaknesses; the situations that make us there, Aesthetic Jam continues to be a feel safe and those that challenge us. platform where ideas and thoughts can One of the strategies I put into play be exchanged implying reactions, presen- is that of placing myself in (literally) tations, and interactions, making the unknown terrain – and then I try to draw. exhibition grow and expand. A place so far out of my comfort zone that What affects the exhibition, does not I cannot have pre-conceptualized it, necessarily come from each participant’s a landscape I have not seen or experienced own discipline and aesthetic doctrine, before, that I am observing first-hand for but rather from their encounter in relation the first time – and then trying to draw. to the previous stage and to each other. A situation I know nothing about but the Aesthetic Jam is about making sense of the fact that I want to draw it and turn my sensible and going back to the sense observations into a representation. of making, which cannot be accomplished What to draw and how to draw it are by single, specialized knowledge. In the the questions that follow; the context collective interest of a new art object triggers a system of representation I could and a semantic space, and in a fluid and not have imagined in any other situation. diversified manner, the exhibition denotes Some forms demand flat lines, others poetic experience. The signification of depth and shadow. The riddle has to be aesthetics – making sense of the sensible solved, the brain has to pull out stra- – can break down in the shock waves of an tagems, and it gets conflicted and confused unforeseen art. Such a transformation but eventually the puzzle gets solved, by can be seen in the passage from Plato to the eye, the mind, and the drawing hand. Aristotle and needs to be anticipated again Eventually the system becomes in our time, where aesthetics attempts unobstructed and the series of drawings to delve into a novel, broad spectrum of can begin to exist. making art.

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Irene Kopelman, Workstation, Aesthetic * – ** Schilthuizen, Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Jam, Taipei Biennial, 2014. Photo credits: Shipher Wu. Leiden University, Leiden; I-Fang Sun, Department of 21 Special thanks to: Shipher Wu, Biodiversity Research Natural Resources and Environmental Studies Center, Academia Sinica, Taiwan; Erik J. van National Dong Hwa University; and Stuart Davies, Nieukerken, Camiel Doorenweerd and Menno Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Photo credits: Shipher Wu *

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*–**** Irene Kopelman, Workstation, Aesthetic Leiden University, Leiden; I-Fang Sun, Jam, Taipei Biennial, 2014. Photo credits: Shipher Department of Natural Resources and Environ- 23 Wu. Special thanks to: Shipher Wu, Biodiversity mental Studies National Dong Hwa University; Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taiwan; Erik J. and Stuart Davies, Smithsonian Tropical van Nieukerken, Camiel Doorenweerd and Menno Research Institute. Photo credits: Shipher Wu. Schilthuizen, Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Photo credits (Image****): Wei-Lung Lin. Experimental Aesthetics expanded field of the curator as “a catalyst” for these talks tended to take over the A Short Story of Thinking in Art more bookish, established world of critics, and methods introducing more experi- mental approaches or formats – networks, John Rajchman laboratories, brain-storming in public – often relayed via e-flux or, more generally, through the Internet. What does “artistic research” have to In this context, “experimental” do with “aesthetics” – or vice versa – (in contrast to avant-garde or neo-avant- and what does “experimental” mean garde) came to qualify an ongoing free, in the context of the intersections between extra-disciplinary search and research. the two? The question emerges within If the resulting question of “experimental a larger situation – that, at any rate, is the aesthetics” is to be re-opened today, premise of the following short story of perhaps the great, global discursive game thinking in art. has itself become in turn institutionalized How, in what context then did the and com-mercialized, threatening the free problem arise? We might think of it as lying roving, experimental spirit that once at the intersection of two recent move- animated it. Have we entered a time not ments. Both emerged in Europe relatively only of biennial and art fair fatigue, but also independently from one another after of the limitation of experimental forms 1989 for a new “millennial” generation they once made possible? It is at this point growing up in the “cognitive environment” that my philosophical short story begins. of the Internet and working in the new It zeroes in on a particular question – what “global” conditions of the 21st century. The then is to think in art, with art, about art two movements – let’s call them the “aes- today, how, where, through what forms, and thetic research” movement and the “re- with what forms of research, what kinds inventing aesthetics” movement – matured of “aesthetic”? In particular, how did in tandem with a “global contemporary the question of “thinking in art” take shape art” (or a contemporaneity in art) which no in the debates of the last years on the longer seemed to fit within any given “re-invention of aesthetics” or “artistic narrative, established expertise, or accepted research,” that might suggest new points of style of criticism. One was thus confronted connection between them today? with a new problem: how to think in We know that “aesthetics” is the name contemporary times without an established of a critical or transcendental discipline critical framework or narrative, when invented by Kant, against Baumgarten’s older models no longer seem to work while idea of a science of sensibility, which would newer ones are yet to be invented. In the then accompany thinking for the next absence of any established discursive or two centuries, and assuming many new critical frame, a space of discussion within forms in the process. But how could it be the institutions – specifically biennials, reinvented in the 21st century or for “con- art fairs, and private museums – came into temporary art”? In this light, we might being which, along with auction houses, think of Jacques Rancière’s attempts in the were driving the novel “globalization” of 1990s to go back to the Kantian “aesthetic the art world. Thus, exhibitions, large-scale revolution.” What mattered in this as well as small or independent, started revolution, he argued, was that the notion hosting discussions and talks. Moreover, the that art, its criticism, functions, and

24 judgment came to revolve around questions moments of dis-identification and eman- of “sensibility” (or aisthesis) rather than, cipation, in which we move out of the as earlier, around ideas of representation or conditions of sensibility we “share” into imitation. In itself this approach was not another place, another space, outside new – indeed Heidegger said as much in the any instituted habitus. At the same time, 1930s in an appendix to his essay on “the such moments of dis-identification and origin of the work of art” about the end of dissensus seem to suggest a new democratic art (aisthesis is the element in which art dies, way of posing the question of “the political” agonizing over two centuries). But Rancière and the role of art (and thinking in art). embarked on a very different angle that For it follows that it is vain to try to turned on a particular view of activity of institutionalize emancipation once and for thinking outside given forms of knowledge all. On the contrary, emancipation lies or constituted communities. Rejecting precisely in crossing instituted frames of the notion of “the end of art,” he imagined sensibility, in “an-archical” moments instead moments of “dis-identification” (without founding principles) and outside for which one model was the condition of the scope of any administrative or party “ignorance” in reading and thinking politics. Thinking and thinking together in together at night carried on in the 19th such moments and spaces thus becomes century French working class. Armed with “extra-disciplinary,” outside constituted dis-identification and dismissing the mis- expertise; in times of dis-identificatory guided notion of postmodernism, emancipation, we are all “amateurs” no Rancière thus took on the debate about matter where we come from. Indeed contemporary art from the fresh angle of this peculiar “equality” is just what makes “indisciplined” forms of thinking in such moments “democratic” in a radical and through art. way, prior to any given political regime or In many ways, his project drew on form of government, appealing to the work of Gilles Deleuze, pushing it into “peoples” not yet given in politics as in art. a new direction. As no one before, Deleuze In short, with his looking back at the called attention to the issue of “the visible” “aesthetic revolution,” Rancière tried to in the work of Michel Foucault. It is hard extend the “difficult legacy” of Foucault in to imagine Rancière’s new program without his own attempt to free the exercise it. In effect, his approach was a develop- and function of critical thinking from ment of Foucault’s attempt to “historicize constituted knowledge and power, the a priori” as a changing regime of the associating instead with “processes of visible, the sayable, and therefore the subjectivization” of a kind found in the arts. do-able, leading to the new questions of When we look back today at Rancière’s how to cross the line. For Rancière, the key new picture of “the aesthetic revolution” question thus became one of “le sensible” from this angle, we of course find further and the crucial problem of how the sensible divisions, further bifurcations. Within is “distributed/shared” (partage) prior to any the larger French context, in particular given condition of intelligibility or any Alain Badiou started talking of an given form of expertise. What does it, then, in-aesthetics of the Event; and his student mean to cross the line of a given “regime” Quentin Meillassoux would try to extend of sensibility and discourse and to think this rejection of “the sensible” to a and think together in places “outside” “speculative realism,” in which, freed from of it? It is here that Rancière introduced his “correlationism” or corresponding notions picture of the unforeseeable arrival of of “finitude” and armed with aesthetic

1 In his account of this movement, Armen Avanessian explicitly draws the contrast with Rancière, 25 Armen Avanessian, The Speculative End of the Aesthetic Regime, 2014, www.textezurkunst.de/93/speculative- end-aesthetic-regime preoccupations with numbers, one could opening up in the times and places of “dis- simply “speculate” about the real inviting identificatory emancipation.” We thus artists to join in.1 find another fork within the larger field of In pursuing another strongly “anti- debate about the role of “sensation” in Badiou” tack on his picture of a non- how we think in the arts – and therefore philosophical understanding of philosophy about “aesthetics.” One that takes us away in the arts given through “sensibility,” from Rancière’s starting point in Kant Francois Laruelle found in Deleuze what it and re-opening earlier “speculative” philo- means to “think” or “have ideas” in the arts sophies that “critical philosophy” had with an a-subjective percept and affect.2 tended to reduce (notably Spinoza), From this perspective, Rancière’s “aesthetic but also extending the role of “sensibility” revolution” remained connected to a in experimental ways, beyond Hume – historical, material matter; not a “specu- who had famously awoken Kant from lative” one – and closer to Foucault. his dogmatic slumbers – and outside the Ever allergic to the role of Artaud, Rancière transcendental subjectivity or inter- questioned more generally the role of subjectivity in which Kant had enclosed it the body in thinking in art than Deleuze in turn. Indeed, for his part Deleuze had had pursued in his own work on cinema or hoped to develop a “philosophy of Nature painting – what is to “have an idea” in at the moment in which difference between cinema, what is the nature of the “violent nature and artifice becomes muted”3 – form of thinking” called painting in Francis as earlier with Spinoza’s idea of the “plane Bacon’s “logic of sensation.” In those of immanence” prior to Cartesian views on writings, Deleuze pushed the question of animals and machines linked to the com- “sensation” or aisthesis into another position of our singular modes of existence. ultimately more “speculative” or less simply The “vital” function of thinking in art historical direction, surrounding the would no doubt have found its place in this question of what it means to think philosophy – as occurred with the new (especially in the arts) with one’s body as question of the brain Deleuze raised in his well as one’s brain – with one’s feet, eyes, aesthetic writings. If art can “give us ears, voices, sexual parts, stomachs or guts. another brain,” he argued, it is because With such bodily or cerebral thinking, there is something about our brains art would find its “vital” function: “give me that can never be “objectified.” Irreducible another brain, give me another body.” In to both “artificial intelligence” and an- this way, Deleuze tried to elaborate the role chorage in a phenomenological “life- of “sensation” Merleau-Ponty had seen world,” our brains derive instead from in Cezanne’s “thinking in painting” outside something like a “cerebral un-thought,” the confines of the phenomenological a source of “vital ideas.” In other words, view where it was still contained, and, going “vital ideas” call for a style of thought back to Husserl, associating it instead that might now be called “speculative,” with a prior chaotic mad zone of “the un- which asks what Nature must be like for thought” into which one must plunge to such “ideas” to be possible. find vital new ideas. What role then does art have as a mode Rancière was not impressed; for him of thinking with respect to larger “eco- everything remained ordered “historical logies” in which we figure together with regimes,” recast, updated as partages, animals and machines? Why does the vital

2 Francosi Laruelle, Against Badiou, www. 4 Ranciere on Mallarme: http:/inclementweather. amazon.com/Anti-Badiou-Introduction-Maoism- wikispaces.com/file/view/RanciereBroodthaers.pdf into-Philosophy/dp/1441195742. In favor of “non- Messailloux on Mallarme: http://www.amazon. philosophy.” www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation- com/The-Number-Siren-Decipherment-Mallarmes/ of-non-philosophy-32.html dp/0983216924. For an account of the problem of “finititude” quite close to the attempt to draw the 26 3 Gilles Deleuze, ‘On Philosophy’ in line for contemporary philosophies in the turn Negotiations, Columbia University Press, New York, from formal or language philosophies to questions of 1995, pp.135–155. genes and brains, see Deleuze’s Appendix to his study of Foucault. function of thinking in the arts emerge of “speculative philosophies” as well. only when restricts itself to For in the end the attempt to substitute asking which brain must be for such mathematico-logical for a linguistic forma- “neuro-aesthetic experimentation” to lism doesn’t really change much. Thus, take place? going back to find “numbers and sirens” From this perspective, Rancière’s in Mallarme, far from being new or con- attempt to update Kant’s “aesthetic revo- temporary, in fact seems to draw us back lution” for the 21st century seems to fall to earlier 20th century kinds of formal back in some ways on 19th century philosophy. In many ways, one is better off formations. Indeed his own “research” with Rancière’s own attempt to think focuses on the French working class instead of the legacy of Mallarme in terms of that period to which he also seems to of materiality of print and the role of “the return as well in his aesthetic writings public” in it as it is taken up in the work (on the ideas of “image” or “realism,” for of Marcel Broodthaers for example.4 example). But is everything happening But how then might the question of “the today just as an extension of this earlier sensible” be extended beyond this French or European moment? Perhaps historical situation to larger questions of today we might instead draw the line new ways of thinking, in particular, beyond of the 21st cen-tury in another way – as the the reliance on print in the Mallarmean passage from the great pre-occupation lineage? More generally, what is “ex- in the philosophy of the last century with perimental aesthetics” today? What kind language, form, system, information, of “research,” what forms of research, methods of inference (or “logic”) to new go with it? questions of brains, genes, and so the It is at this point that my story re- larger material “eco-logies” developing in connects with the question of “research” tandem with the new role of global in the “aesthetic research movement” – “information technologies” in which as well, albeit in another way, with the thinking now takes place. Today it would revival of the idea and role of research by seem quite quaint to reduce the role of Rem Koolhaas in architecture. In an “thinking in art” to questions of art and earlier essay, I looked at this question in language once so important to “con- relation to Deleuze’s principle in his study ceptual art” – thinking in the arts has long of the “search” or “research” for lost worked in ways not exhausted by Wittgen- time in Proust, where “ideas always come stein’s great distinction between public after,” without prior method, therefore and private language. Indeed Rancière, requiring “experimental” ways.5 But we who had little use for “conceptual art” of need to extend this idea outside the this type, might then be seen in this light stratified world of Paris at the turn of the – we “think in art” in ways that come before century into the new 21st century’s “global the order of language, the “forms of life,” arena,” in which the question is being or the habits that underlie it and to which posed today. Perhaps this publication will we gain access only after those moments suggest new ideas – my short story is of “dissensus” and “experimentation” that an attempt to offer one philosophical way free us from given public languages and into them. related forms of life opening up new possibilities. But this way of drawing the line for philosophies – therefore aesthetics – in the 21st century affects the question

27 5 In Art as a Thinking Process: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production,Mara Ambrozic and Angela Vetesse (Eds.), Sternberg Press, / New York, 2013. 28 * Aesthetic Jam, after second production period. From left to right: Exhibition view Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2014. Photo Irene Kopelman, Workstation 29 credits: Wei-Lung Lin. Kai Huang Chen, Sea Route Chang Nai-Wen, Untitled Clodagh Emoe, Metaphysical Longings Tiong Ang, House of Shyness Drifting Studio Practice no longer interested in the folds that connect times and places that seem distant From molding sugar to the unknown at first sight. We felt more affinity with depths of the sea Michel Serres’ crumpled handkerchief. According to the French philosopher, a linear understanding of time entails that Lonnie van Brummelen & the last event on the timeline is perceived Siebren de Haan to be the most contemporary and re- levant, but it cannot explain why certain events or inventions from the past are still 1 The return of the material material today. He therefore proposes The cinematic essay Monument of Sugar – the model of the bunched up hand- How to Use Artistic Means to Elude kerchief: two points that are far apart Trade Barriers (2007) opens with a title: when the cloth is flattened out can be very “The return of the material.” This adage close once it is crumpled up.1 resonates with recent developments in These ontological considerations were theory that seem indicative of a renewed the starting point for a practical experi- interest in the physical world. In Eco- ment aimed at making banished matter logy without Nature, for example, Timothy return. That sugar became the protagonist Morton bases himself on literature of this was the result of to demonstrate that the concept of nature an off-the-cuff remark made by a Polish behaves as a transcendental category farmer whom we met near the Polish- of thought that has little to do with the Ukrainian border on May 1, 2004 – the day entangled reality. In Vibrant Matter, Jane it transformed from a national into a Euro- Bennett proposes an opposite critique, pean border. While offering us homemade in this case with regards to matter. Matter, sausages and coffee, he told us that she puts forward, is not inert and passive, Polish cukier had become “twice as sweet” as modernity conceives it, but pulsating since the country’s entry into the European and forceful. Union. It had even become cheaper to Why did we choose to make the return buy Polish sugar in the Ukraine than of the material our epigram? To explain in Poland itself. What is the secret of this this, we must revert to neoliberal post- miracle of prices? Europe’s sugar beet industrial society as it existed before the manufacturers are protected from global recent economic crisis. The production price level fluctuations by a fixed minimum and assembly of goods had been trans- price many times higher than the pre- ferred to the periphery and was considered vailing world market price; simultaneously, anachronistic – something we had left substantial trade tariffs ward off foreign behind. The reality of things, how they competitors and export subsidies help were manufactured, and which landscapes to make expensive European sugar com- they connected no longer seemed relevant. petitive worldwide.2 As artists who derive pleasure from the encounter with materials and the search 2 Minimal intervention for unexpected entanglements, we felt The operation Monument of Sugar slightly ill at ease in the so-called know- consisted of inverting the subsidized flow ledge economy – which had disconnected of sugar by molding it into a monument. itself from the physical world and was As a monument, sugar could be imported

0 An extended reflection on this topic has 1 Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations appeared in the book World of Matter, edited on Science, Culture and Time, translated by Roxanne by Inke Arns, published by Sternberg Press, Berlin/ Lapidoux, University of Michigan press/Ann Arbor New York, 2014. publishing, 1998, p. 45. 30 2 This price regime has now been partially abandoned after receiving criticism from the World Trade Organisation. under heading 9703 of the European Had we succeeded in making matter Harmonized Commodity Description and return? Or had we still approached Coding System, which ensures duty- sugar too much as a neutral, passive sub- free import for “original sculptures and stance that could be turned into a statuary, in any material.”3 United Nations monument to invert a trade flow? Perhaps Commodity Trade Statistics showed that the experiment had succeeded because the bulk of Europe’s subsidized sugar we failed, because the sugar effectively was exported to Nigeria. Armed with this revolted and resisted our desire to mold information, we departed for Lagos. it. Based on these experiments, we de- But finding European sugar in the hectic veloped a drifting studio practice: an artistic and fragile infrastructure of the African attitude which may be summarized as city of millions turned out to be no a moving along with things, so as to be mean feat; nor was turning loose sugar able to attend to their recalcitrance.5 crystals into a solid mass in tropic, humid conditions. From our Nigerian colleagues 3 Drifting Studio Practice we learned to adjust our plans and to When a regional art museum invited us to take into account in our artistic actions engage in an artistic inquiry among the that things can be unpredictable, withdraw fishing community of Urk, we seized upon themselves from us and display a will of the opportunity to elaborate further on their own. Thanks to their advice, we the notion of drifting.6 After all, who could did finally manage to create a monument.4 be more accustomed to instability and Our plan was to turn the sugar into things that retreat than fishermen who, solid minimal blocks, but this operation generation upon generation, confidently turned out to be a painstaking opera- cast their nets down from the sea’s tion. Artists like to speak of a “resistance in restless surface into unknown depths? the material,” but Nigeria’s sweet crystals We visited Urk for the first time in spring were outright rebelling against our will 2011. The Dutch government had just an- to form. The fine grains could barely be nounced a stiff package of budget cuts for compressed into a stable substance. cultural spending, and cultural producers Due to the tropical humidity, the brittle were being cast as scroungers for relying blocks failed to dry out. The casts, which on subsidies. When we introduced emerged sharp and white from their ourselves to a group of fishermen as artists, moulds, gradually morphed into grimy, we therefore discreetly added that the re- sagging lumps with little trace of right putation of our sector had recently suffered angles. Only through endless post- some damage. The fishermen nodded that processing did we eventually obtain more for them too, the days when they were or less firm and uniform shapes. Alas, “heroes of the sea” were long gone: now- during the overseas travel by cargo ship, adays, they were seen as pirates who were the process of decay began anew. When the fishing the world’s oceans dry. Together sugar blocks arrived in Europe after we sighed that we shared an image problem their long journey, they were softer than – this is how our collaboration started. butter and almost impossible to extricate We knew the fishing village from media from their packaging. accounts as a conservative, deeply religious

3 For the full narrative of the film, see also 5 Film essay Monument of Sugar – how to use artistic the publication Monument en Sucre – comment utiliser means to elude trade barriers, final chapter. des moyens artistiques pour échapper aux barrières douanières / Monument of Sugar – how to use artistic means to elude 6 Museum de Paviljoens, Almere, invited us for trade barriers, published in collaboration with Palais de the residency in Urk. Shortly after the commission, Tokyo Paris and Argos Brussels, Van Brummelen the museum’s funding was discontinued and it closed & De Haan, Paris, 2007. in 2013.

31 4 The suggestion to opt for a material approach, using matter at hand, was offered to us by the sculptors Mr. Fidelis Odogwu and Mr. Richardson Ovbiebo. reservation, where the order of things of that reduced fuel usage and toxic exhaust the 1950s had been conserved. Yet during fumes; and techniques of killing fish our fieldwork we encountered a more that reduced pointless suffering, through ambivalent Urk. Certainly, on Sundays the anesthetizing the fish before they were churches were filled and the ring of Old gutted. Testament language suggested that indeed By doing our rounds through town and we were in a town where time had stood visiting the outer docks and fishing indus- still. But the Urkers were also an entrepre- tries, we gradually managed to win neurial lot, worldly and inventive. In the Urkers’ trust. We transcribed each con- order to obtain more fishing rights, many versation we had with them and com- of the fishermen had purchased Danish, pressed the hundreds of pages into a script. Belgian, German or English fishing boats, We then proposed this to the inhabitants, because buying a foreign ship included and asked if they would recite the sen- the fishing quota allotted to it. Local family tences on camera. The script was carefully firms had thus become multinational read through and appropriated in the businesses. Also their catch was exported islander dialect. On Saturdays, we filmed to the farthest reaches of the world. On top these recitations, performed on the ships, of that, Urkers were ahead of the curve in on the quays and on the former sea soil; finding novel fishing techniques that did during the week we visited the fish fac- less damage to the sea soils; adaptations tories, the auction house, the wharfs and

*

32 * Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Episode of the Sea (still). 35mm film, black-and-white, 60 min, 2013 the docks, both when work was being same for every lucid mind. But behind this carried out and when they were deserted. anonymous community, which we know Our cine-eye filled itself up with working and which is the work of reason, there still bodies, surfaces eroded by the salt- lies this other community that has no water, nets spreading, and lifeless fish reason – the community of those who have being measured, weighed, and filleted to nothing in common. be delivered straight to the shops or to Had we, in our focus on material be frozen into stiff boards. practice, perhaps forgotten Serres’ crump- Occasionally, our instruments and led handkerchief, which allowed the ourselves were invited to go out to sea with forefathers to infiltrate today’s world? But the fishermen. Then we adopted their would the ancestors agree with the local rhythm of two hours of work, followed catch of flatfish being transported over the by a short nap. We learned that the world’s oceans to be offered on the global whipping of ropes and creaking of cables market as generic white fish? announced that full nets would be hauled Much as we struggled to understand on board, and that when the pin was why they work like they do, the fishermen removed from the railing, we had to stand had difficulty grasping why we were back because the heavy nets would soon so attached to our obsolete 35mm camera, drag violently across the deck, only to which had to be reloaded every four careen back into the sea moments later. minutes. And just like them, we invoked The most disruptive experience, our forefathers to explain ourselves and however, was the endless flow of struggling told them about Robert Flaherty’s Man of fish gasping for water, gutted one by one Aran, Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema, with the flick of a knife. When we asked Jean Rouch’s Bataille sur le grand fleuve, and the fishermen about this cruel aspect Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s of their practice, they explained that this Klassenverhältnisse. was what they had been taught by their fathers, who had in turn been taught 5 Co-authorship by their fathers: “Nowadays people aren’t To allow the fishermen to tell their own used to that; nowadays you are expected story we had entered into a co-author- to have feelings with everything you do.”7 ship with them, but other authors had also silently slipped in. The work program 4 The other community of the fishermen – and thereby that of In The Community of Those Who Have Nothing the film we produced together – was in Common, Alphonso Lingis describes largely determined by the migration of the how in mercantile port cities of Greece, fish, the direction and force of the wind, strangers arrive who ask the Greeks, the customs passed on by ancestors, “Why do you do as you do?” To which the and their faith. In addition to those forces, Greek answer, like all groups who express other dominant players had entered into their distinctness: “Because our fathers the field, such as the massive imports have taught us to do so, because our gods of fish farmed in Asia, the hike in oil prices have decreed that it be so.”8 Lingis and the filling up of warehouses. These describes how a new community emerges caused a decline in income, and made for when the Greeks begin to give a reason that a situation in which embarking on new the strangers, who do not share their fishing excursions was unviable. All these ancestors or gods, can accept. Because actors guide the film Episode of the Sea. reason speaks in a language which is the With an imagery referring to neo-realist

33 7 Conversation with fisherman Tjeerd de Boer, 8 Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Urk, September 14, 2011. Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1994, p.3. cinema and early documentary film, An Anachronistic we have attempted to put into images this Aesthesis paradoxical world that attains its rhythm from ancestors, religion and the cycles The inedible following upon the of nature, but is overwhelmed by a market unspeakable pragmatics. Simultaneously, parallels emerge between the practices of fishing and filming. Mick Wilson We had conceived that we could learn from the fishermen how to deal with instability and things that retreat. But as 1 The aesthetic re-arrangement it turned out, they were dragged along by In the early 1990s, having completed a globalizing forces in a mind-set of cal- research project on the disavowal (“refu- culation and division, in which everything sal”) of the aesthetic within Russian is expressed as a matter of control, and constructivist and productivist discourse, unpredictability is the first thing one tries I attempted to initiate a doctoral research to eliminate. Still we caught a glimpse of project on the question of philosophical that other community, headed by ancestors, aesthetics as an early enlightenment which sees the world of things as a field discursive address to embodiment and sen- of forces with rules of its own; a world in sory knowing.1 My proposition was that which all is connected. And it is this other (one version of) philosophical aesthetics community by which we have become had emerged initially as an attempt captivated and which we want to continue to frame a discourse on the specificity of to explore. bodily cognition, sensory apprehension and experience, but had subsequently been transposed, by way of the Kantian and post-Kantian recuperation of Baum- garten’s neologism, into a discourse on the fine arts and on refined pleasures.2 The drive animating this research proposal was a speculation on what might have emerged if, within the general project of the enlight- enment, the questions of the corporeal and the aesthetic had been consolidated within a formal philosophical discourse. What if the enquiry into aesthesis had taken as its privileged object of study, not the work of art nor the encounter with art works or the (art-like) “natural world,” but rather instead, the appetites, pleasures, pains, corporeal pulsions and material flux of the eating-breathing-

1 For the original proposal see www.smallfatman. com/?page_id=1691

2 Baumgarten’s role in inaugurating a new dis- course on aesthetics is partly obscured by later developments and is also disputed. Even in Baum- garten’s own period his ideas seem to have circulated initially in the form of secondary texts. His bulky and unfinished Aesthetica (1750–1758) appears to have 34 been the culmination of his work in this area. Much of it appears to have been anticipated in earlier works, especially in the Metaphysica of 1739 in which he already argued the case for a “science of sense know- ledge,” and in which the term aesthetica first appeared. sleeping-farting-laughing-sweating- contagion, privacy, maternity/paternity, birthing-coughing-running-sitting-fucking- sodomy, mortality, biosecurity, and so yearning-craving-walking-daydreaming- forth) at this time. In such a context, my falling-leaking bodied (“human”) being? proposed historical reconstruction was This was proposed as a question of both somewhat (self-consciously) anachronistic the proximal visceral lived “subject” body, in as much as I was in part imposing the and of the distantiated scopic “object” critical priorities of the late twentieth body, that sees and is seen in the field of century onto the pre-critical moment of an visual relations. This was also a matter of early enlightenment discursive formation. the body that subsists in febrile mutability This context also meant that the across many other registers beyond the proposal, to re-address the historical visual. My interest was not in a twin constitution of philosophical aesthetics thematization of the body as both Leib and the body, was most often met with and Körper, nor in a tired prejudicial trial a certain ho-hum, off-hand or blasé of Cartesian mind-body dualist heresy, expression from my colleagues whenever but in an attempt to think the body as the attempt was made to articulate it. In an integral manifold of dancing fleshly- terms of criticism, and the question of logos, of weeping-meaty-growth, and of “theory,” my colleagues would ask, are we raging-carnal-reverie. The goal was to not working in the tradition of Ricoeur’s think-and-do the aesthetic not as a matter masters of suspicion, and “surely they of a “natural” or “authentic” body, but to were all about the body: the laboring body; think-and-do the aesthetic in an address to the agonistic and the despised body; the bodily being as a mode far more extensive bodily unconscious?” Then there was than, and conceptually prior to, the this intense intellectual excitement and elaboration of the system of the fine arts. dizzying affect flowing from the early 1990s This was self-consciously an attempt to work on gendered bodies troubling gender; evade aesthetics as a discourse perennially on material bodies that mattered; on weird negotiating – and seeking to “overcome” cyborg bodies that were wired-otherwise – a subject-object field of relations and so forth. So my colleagues would say, through the privileged relays of exquisitely in a somewhat deflationary way: “isn’t sensitized subjectivity and the “privileged” everything always already about the body?” objects and of art. In terms of a specifically “aesthetic” This proposed research was topical in discourse, they would point to the many ways, and reflected my immersion traditions of literature and suggest that in a contemporary art discourse oriented the body is the substantive preoccupation to all things corporeal. In the 1990s the of literary art in general: from Swift’s discussions of the art world, and the world scatalogical obsessions to Joyce’s flushed of criticism more generally, were littered orgasms; from ecriture feminine to I with “bodies.” The liberal democratic Sing the Body Electric; from the Rabelaisian political imaginary was also dissecting the grotesque body to the Sadean libertine rights and wrongs of the “body” politic “nature” body; from Proustian gustatory (abortion, reproduction, insemination, reminiscence to Shakespearian corporeal

Baumgarten lectured for many years on the subject before the first part of the Aesthetica was published. Eva Schaper has described the circulation of Baumgarten’s ideas as follows: “So fast was the transmission and assimilation of learning – and the publication of books – in the eighteenth century that G.F. Meier, one of Baumgarten’s pupils, was able to popularise (and inevitably to distort thereby) Baumgarten’s thought in his own Anfangsgrunde 35 aller schonen Kunste und Wissenschaften of 1748. [...] To some extent, then, Meier’s more accessible work took the wind out of the Aesthetica’s sail.” British Journal of Aesthetics (1985) 25 (3): pp. 278–279. bloodlusts. Citing these different literary a disavowal of Fleisch und Blut, suggesting monuments colleagues would ask: “what that the claims of corporeality were an is literature if not a song of bodily being?” oft-repeated refrain within the philoso- Others would exclaim: “Feminism!” and phical tradition across the last two announce that “given the body in sex- centuries: “Modern European philosophy ual politics is the very ground upon which as a whole, from its beginning (in contesting projects of enslavement and Descartes) has this common flaw: for it emancipation are performed, what is nature does not exist, it lacks a living Feminism if not a demand to recognize ground. … If a philosophy lacks this living the body as a political site of colonization fundament … it loses itself in the kind and resistance, and as such, is it not of system whose attenuated concepts of inevitably an urgent challenge to reform- aseity, modifications, etc., stand in ulate all questions of bodily knowing?” sharpest contrast to the vital force and Under the influence of the intense fullness of reality.”3 debates within queer culture and feminist For various reasons my project was critique, the problematic of sexual never finished, and I later completed a pleasure was a key impetus to re-think the doctorate on a very different topic, in very emergence of philosophical aesthetics different circumstances, and now today I as potentially a discourse on the pleasures work with researchers engaged by very of the body, and not one primarily different concerns. The fashion for talk attending to the experiences of art, or at of the body has predictably waned over the least not a discourse that proposes the intervening two decades, and while the experience of art as paradigmatic for the intensification of interest in Foucauldian aesthetic in general. How was it that biopolitics signals one line of intellectual philosophical modernity had produced development building upon the body talk such a lively and highly intricate literature of the 1990s, it also suggests a re-inscription on the values, experiences and specifi- of Foucault’s project to study the histo- cities of high art and such an anaemic and rically specific bodily techniques of bio- unenthusiastic literature on fucking and politics into the a-historical and abstractly- sexual intensities? How could we have corporeal terms of something as generative and as profound in the grand manner (pace Agamben). as the philosophical literature on art, on As such the recent vogue for biopolitical the one hand, and something as anodyne themes in art discourses, in as much as it as sexology and “the joy of sex,” on the attends to Agamben more than to Foucault, other hand? These were my questions, suggests rather a retreat from the political but, of course my colleagues would again dynamics of fugitive lived bodies into restrain my libidinal over-investment the politesse of rigorous mortifying logos. by gently reminding me that there was a So now, twenty years later, and rather profound tradition of psycho- engaged with different networks of analytic enquiry that had indeed wrestled colleagues, and inevitably responding to with bodily pleasures, embodied sub- new intellectual fashions, I find myself jectivity and sexuality: “a tradition, which in the midst of a different set of rhetorics while highly contested, could hardly be of the aesthetic and responding within a called bloodless!” Another colleague radically expanded contemporary art pointed to Schelling’s denouncement of system. I am writing now at a time marked philosophy for its seeking after the essence by a longstanding resurgence of the aes- of things in forms and concepts through thetic as an acceptable topic for practicing

3 From Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Matters Connected 36 Therewith. (1809) This translation is taken from David Farrell Krell’s (2005) The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God, Indiana University Press. p. 76. artists (no longer the analogue of orni- based practices that revolve around the hology for the birds).4 This is also a mo- predictable formula of children’s work- ment in contemporary art debates marked shops, discussions, meals, film screenings by the widespread currency of “artistic and walks.”5 While Bishop merely itemizes research” as a problem bridging between “meals” as one more cliché on her list, parts of the mainstream art world and she could rightfully claim that the pre- parts of the art school system. Artistic sence of food, as material, medium, research appears to be seeking to re-map subject matter and context of contem- the intrinsic relations of praxis (theory and porary artworks, has been an in-creasingly practice), attempting to generate tem- prominent tendency since at least the porary autonomous zones exceeding the 1960s and has become, by now, pretty logics of markets and of bureaucracies, much a norm of the art world (and of while co-opting resources from both, and various counter-cultural tendencies and proposing the possibility of a space of independent scenes that interact in experimental aesthetics unencumbered by different ways with the global art system.) the reductive demands of explanations, However, it would seem that the range value-measures, and instrumentality. and variety of food practices in the con- In responding to this conjunction, temporary art field exceed anything I find myself revisiting this project to re- that could be properly called a “pre- imagine aesthetic enquiry as an address dictable formula.” to the generalized context of bodily being, Consider a relatively arbitrary range and not as a reflection on the objects and of projects such as: Future Farmers Victory experiences of art per se. Perhaps as an Gardens (2006–ongoing); The Domestic index of my own bodily aging, I find the Godless (2002–ongoing); Dirtstar’s Night priorities among my interests – in thinking Soil (2010); Edible Estates (2005–ongoing); the aesthetic as a matter of bodied being Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art and trying to disentangle this enquiry (2012); The Gatherers: Greening Our Urban from the privileged objects and terms of Spheres (2008–2009); Homebaked: A Perfect art – moving somewhat away from the Recipe (2014); Dining in Refugee Camps: question of sexuality, and more towards The Art of Sahrawi Cooking (2010); and The such matters as food and death. Perhaps How Not To Cook Something: Lessons learned these are the appropriately expanded the hard way (2009). Then place these appetites and anxieties of an expanded also in relationship with practices from and privileged middle-aged body. In any previous decades such as: Alison Knowles case, these are some of the concerns that Identical Lunch (1960s); Tina Girouard’s, have framed my own practice in recent Carol Gooden’s and Gordon Matta years, and in the next section of the Clarke’s “FOOD (1971); Joseph Beuys paper I would like to suggest, somewhat art of eating (1970s); and Suzanne Lacy’s schematically and impressionistically, International Dinner Party (1979). One a trajectory for this renewed enquiry with begins to recognise that the intersection of reference to the question of the body, the contemporary art and food practices is aesthetic and various food things. a multiply enacted and diversely produced encounter. 2 The distribution of the edible There are, indeed, certain formulas Claire Bishop in her highly entertaining, and tactics that are re-used: the eatery; if somewhat inflammatory, Artificial Hells, the cookbook; commensualism; olfactory has referred to “a slew of community- and gustatory shock or titillation; the

4 Barnett Newman is famously accredited with 5 Claire Bishop (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory the line “aesthetics is for artists as ornithology is Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, p. 21. 37 for the birds.” dynamics of the gift; the tracing of ripeness of bodily being in general, and the and decay; the agency of do-it-yourself; question of the aesthesis of the eating body the commons, the local and the everyday. in particular, are not thereby rehearsed However, contra Bishop’s reductive ges- within a wider philosophical perspective. ture, this typology of forms and concerns We have a mobilisation of food ways within does not exhaustively specify the ex- art practices, and we have a particular perimental work that has happened in the elaboration of the consuming body within mobilisation of foodways within the these works, as well as an attempted art field. (Inevitably, there is a need for articulation of these with broader politics extreme caution here in constructing of conviviality, sustainability, ecological a simplistic “art and food” conjunction in and climate crisis, and so forth. However, this way, which can so easily degenerate in the register of philosophical aesthetics into the triteness of the notorious – and the response to these developments, and hopefully apocryphal – undergraduate we have a reversion to questions of the essay task on “the cat in art.”) proprieties of properly artistic art and to The salient point here, though, is that the specificity of the aesthetic understood many food practices have been effectively precisely as that which is not located within operationalized and thematized within the gustatory play, the urgencies nor the contemporary art. Taken in the context of sustenance of lived bodies, but rather my proposal to re-imagine aesthetics, only in the je ne sais quoi of distantiated, does this not make it clear then that the reflective and refined aesthetic judgement, question of the aesthetic, as an enquiry only in the never-to-be-swallowed-whole into bodily being, with reference to our – as if – food-for-thought of art.6 embodied entanglement in foodways and The aesthetic is, again, not a matter wider food systems for example, is of the unrelenting flux of ravenous-living- something that can easily proceed, even testing-tasting-sucking-swelling- where philosophical aesthetics still tends masticating-defecating-grasping-gorging- to take as its privileged objects the work licking-starving-and-satiating-then- of art or the experience of art? Isn’t the vomiting bodies. It is not at work in the initial response of my colleagues from two production and negotiation of these decades ago still the appropriate one: bodies through the distributions of scarcity Isn’t everything already about the body, and plenty; of the edible and the inedible; and isn’t there a wide variety of discursive of the tasty and the disgusting; of the bland frames and practices already actively and the spicy; of the bitter and the sweet; addressing the aesthesis of the body in of the noxious and the more-ish; of general, and, with reference to the current the savoured and the swallowed swiftly; of example, the food consuming body in the subtle and the strong: but rather, the particular? aesthetic operates as a (re-) distribution The answer, at this point, I believe is of the sensible. Aesthetics elaborates it- “no”: No, it is not the case that these self not in an animalistic nor a vegetative developments put meaty flesh upon the nor a fungal nor even a rhizomatic mode bare dry bones of philosophical aesthetics. but more in a crystalline self-re-calibrating The reason for this is that the question manner. Aesthetics – as a re-distribution

6 Thus the debate between Claire Bishop and Grant Kester initiated on the pages of Artforum in the mid-2000s re-instates the question of what is properly artistic in social art practices, and it is on this point that the philosopher Jacques Ranciere is brought into play. Elsewhere Rancière himself intervenes on just such a basis, so that in spite of appearances his analytic of the “aesthetic regime” re-instates the primacy of the artistic. To put it 38 roughly, but succinctly, aesthetics is deemed a regime of art rather than art being deemed a specific sub- division of the field of aesthesis (and a highly niche-specific one at that). of the sensible, of the seeable and the sayable – is a matter of structuring the economy of the almost-sensual; the almost-but-never-quite-a-drop-of-saliva- leaked-from-the-mouth-sensual. The aesthetic remains a term not properly spoken from a drooling mouth. To go further, and from the dry parched mouth, from the hungry mouth, or from the speaking-with-mouthful mouth, it may be worth saying something about the inexorable entanglement of aesthetics and politics in the current fragility of the global food system. Is it not then an exercise in experimental aesthetics to consider the food thing that is put into some mouths and reserved from others? Or is that too much to swallow perhaps when one may wish to savour the tasty morsels of autonomy? Can aesthesis transition the scales of one body to many bodies, from my mouth to speak into your mouth, without reducing all these beautiful open mouths and their noisy teeth into grim instruments of shy chattering and lonely gaping?

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40 41 * Mick Wilson, Around the Food Thing. Installation at The Judgement is the Mirror, Living Art Museum, Reykjavkik, 2013 Aesthetics and the “as if ” discourse, a critical method, an evaluative tool, an experiential register, affect, morality, art, not-art, and beauty. Rather Timotheus Vermeulen than to simply see this diversity as a sign of the field’s slipperiness, I think it should be perceived as a sign of uncharted po- After years of turning a blind eye, or tential: as the territory is re-explored, many even a stink eye, scholars and critics new pathways are encountered, some have recently refocused their attention of which may lead to dead-ends but others on aesthetics. The output ranges from of which could just lead to novel insights. anthologies about Rancière’s aesthetic regime What I mean to say, I guess, is that in a and Badiou’s inaesthetics to journal ar- sense all current aesthetic research is ex- ticles about Lyotard and Iser’s aesthetic perimental, adopting a course unsure theories to blog posts about the canon of its outcome. In what follows, I wish to of Adorno and Kant, and discusses topics make a very brief, and certainly quite as diverse as beauty and the sublime, modest contribution to this developing fictionality, and object-oriented ontology. There discourse of re-exploration by proposing an has been so much interest in aesthetics, understanding of aesthetics as an “as if ” indeed, that some have started to speak modality. In pursuing this argument, I draw of a “revival of aesthetics” (Avanessian and on the writings of the British philosopher Skrebowski, 2011) or even an “aesthetic Eva Schaper (1924–1992) and the German turn” (Halsall, Janssen and O’Connor thinker Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933), though 2004; 2009). This aesthetic turn should be not always explicitly in the detail they understood, however, less as a “redis- deserve or necessarily in the manner they covery”, as has been suggested, than as a intended. re-exploration. If you rediscover some- When I speak about aesthetics here I thing, you locate something you had lost speak about a dimension of experience. It is from sight or forgotten. To re-explore is a dimension that engages with the world to re-examine a thing you knew all along around us on the level of what may be was there. To be sure: no one ever lost sight called, in lack of a more appropriate term, of aesthetics. People just assumed there form: visual form, acoustic form, form was nothing left to find there. Frustrated, of taste, the qualities of scent, of touch, presumably, by the impasse at which or otherwise. It is distinct from other postmodern and poststructuralist theory dimensions of experience like use, found themselves and encouraged by or mathematics though not necessarily the pioneering travels of Deleuze, Rancière separate from them – indeed, more often and Badiou, scholars in the 2000s have than not they overlap. As I see it, the returned to aesthetics to see if there aesthetic dimension can be animated by is anything else to source. As it turns out, external factors (a sunset, a Rothko there is. Quite a lot, in fact: perhaps painting, or as in a Seinfeld episode, even the most pronounced characteristic of the the song “Desperado”), but it can just as current spate of aesthetic research is how well be activated at will, as a mode, much each of the studies and its approach approach or attitude towards the world to aesthetics differs from the others. (I’m thinking here of a practice like dandy- Depending on whom you read, aesthetics ism, of course, but also of artistic research, stands for, amongst others, a socio-histori- in which a focus on form is taken to cal regime, an ideology, a theoretical social, economic or biological questions).

42 Note This essay develops further the argument outlined in the essay ‘As If,’ which was published in the anthology Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic, edited by James Elkins and Harper Montgomery in 2013.

This dimension, finally, is individual yet as As I write this, there is a debate going Rancière has shown us also tied to particular on in the Netherlands, where I teach, regimes of distribution of the sensible. about the state of politically engaged art. It Importantly, the aesthetic experience is a debate that I am certain readers from is an affective experience – not a dis- other countries will be intimately familiar affected calculation (which is not to say, with as well. On one side of the debate to be sure, that the former could not stands the critic and curator Hans den follow from the latter; there are plenty of Hartog Jager, who argues that politically historical examples that prove this). It is a engaged artists and curators have lost sensation of resonance, of connection, touch both with reality and their publics. with someone or something else because of Curators like Charles Esche and Maria their formal qualities – as opposed to Hlavajova and artists such as Hito Steyerl their practical use or ethical value. Of and Jonas Staal, he maintains, are course, the phrase Kant used to define this speaking to an audience that no longer experience was “purposiveness without pays attention nor has been for quite a purpose”: in the aesthetic judgment we while. Den Hartog Jager’s argument here, appreciate something as purposeful even however, is not necessarily that artistic though its purpose cannot be empirically discourse has become incomprehensible, or logically established. Vaihinger and as is so often – and at times rightly – Schaper later interestingly and insightfully suggested, but rather that it has become describe this modality in terms of an all too comprehensible, too predictable: “as if ”. When you use the phrase ‘as if ’ you it still sticks to the line it took in the 1920s, make a comparison or analogy (the con- without reflecting on either their own junction as) with a conditional clause changing position or the developments in (the modification if), that is to say, with a contemporary society. On the other side of possibility rather than a fact (Vaihinger the debate stand the accused, I guess, 2009 [1911]: 91–93). If my neighbor says alongside their defenders. Their counter to me “it looks as if it is going to rain”, arguments are manifold, though it must be after all, what he is telling me is that said that they tend to be of the defensive judging from the clouds or the behavior of kind more than the affirmative sort. the mosquitoes or the feeling in his right They range from the somewhat pitiable index finger it may well rain, though this is questioning of Den Hartog Jager’s political by no means certain. Or when Cher in affinities to justified interrogations per- Clueless shouts in indignation “as if !”, she taining to the lack of in-depth analysis is articulating grave doubt. For Vaihinger to equally legitimate problematizations of and Schaper, what the aesthetic experience some of his assumptions. as described by Kant implies, what it is I do not agree with Den Hartog Jager’s conditioned on, is the appreciation of one argument, though I don’t think his assess- thing – say, nature – as if it was another ment is as wide off the mark as some that it most likely is not – art. As Schaper of his opponents make it out to be. There put it more eloquently herself: “we certainly is a discourse in art that is at approach objects aesthetically when we once incomprehensible and predictable, recognize with delight, wonder, and that requires from its public not only arrested attention the structural patterns of years and years of study of art historical things; when, despite being unable to and philosophical or quasi-philosophical say that they exhibit purpose, we approach debates (the Groys’, the Badious, the them as if they did.” (1964–65: 227) speculative realists, the accelerationists,

43 etc), but also a distinct political incli- Den Hartog Jager criticizes Staal’s nation. The problem is not conceptually performances solely on the level of use or challenging art, a public space for ethics whereas the dimension the artist experimentation, it is jargonistic exclusive seems to cultivate – and therefore should art, a club for members only. Similarly, be judged on – is that of aesthetics. Just as politically engaged art is not an issue. Kant, when describing the aesthetic The issue is rather art in which form judgment, considers nature as if it were art, is exhausted by a specific politics (which or Schaper, who contemplates purpose is not necessarily the same, by the way, where there isn’t any, Staal approaches as art produced in order to propagate political regimes as if they were formal such politics, as Eisenstein and Riefen- compositions, lines of reasoning as if they stahl, whose films are far more mul- were poetic tropes. The idea here seems tiplicitous than the single message they less to reduce one to the other than to need to convey, have demonstrated). expand the political discourse by treating Remember many of Godard’s later films? it as if it were another modality, one that Here Den Hartog Jager’s examples importantly we understand it isn’t and unfortunately do not help his case. perhaps cannot be. In engaging in politics Take Jonas Staal. There is undoubtedly formally, Staal takes into account and much you can say about Staal’s work, pursues alternative criteria. Many if not but not, it seems to me, that it is repet- all of these pursuits will, when translated itive. Staal’s performances, from The Geert back to politics, be failures, imagining Wilders Works (2005–8), in which he turns dangerous and even disastrous virtual an actual court case into an theatre play realities. Yet whatever their outcomes, they cum public debate, to the New World reintroduce the intimation of the Summit series (2012–present), in which he alternative, the sensation that, perhaps, constitutes temporary parliaments just perhaps, History has not ended, peopled by representatives of banned, Art is not over, the horizon not wiped out stateless and terrorist political organi- – sentiments that seem to me to be very zations, are less intended to set forth important at a moment in time where the one particular politics than to stretch the economic, political and social realities of limits of what politics can mean for the day necessitate a critical yet ima- us today by imagining occasionally insane ginative look around us. Ironically, if we scenario’s that could not take place read Staal’s performances along these within the context of those politics – lines, they have surprisingly much in these scenario’s, also, may vary consider- common with the works of Yael Bartana ably. It is true that Staal himself has and Renzo Martens, two of the artists an ideological bias, one with which many I am pleased to read Den Hartog Jager people may well take issue. It might fur- cites approvingly. ther be argued that this partiality informs None of the above discussion of (the premise of) his performances. But aesthetics is experimental in the sense that it does, as of yet at least, not circumscribe it is original or radical. Indeed, many of or limit these performances. Indeed, the ideas expressed here have surely been Staal’s performances are not simply po- articulated far more intelligently and litical pamphlets so much as the critical eloquently by others, if not by Schaper, tools of inquiry for an artistic research Vaihinger, Schiller, or Kant than by others project undertaken towards a PhD. who, knowingly or unwittingly, took on some of their ideas. But it is experimental,

44 I feel, in the sense that it continues, or reinstates, a long abandoned course of action of which the outcomes are unsure. The power of an aesthetic discourse as I understand it, whether willful (as by Staal or Bartana or Martens) or as unexpected experience, lies in its appreciation of the imagination of the impossible possibility of an unseizable purpose – to recognize its sense of radical openness, to value its pulsating spirit of potential. To me the task of art – and I include artistic research and writing about art here – is to arti- culate this imagination, not by explicating which path to pave or which utopia to fight for, but by returning to the public sphere the spirit of the alternative.

Bibliography Avanessian, Armen and Luke Skrebowski, ‘Introduction’, Armen Avanessian and Luke Skrebowski (eds.), Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011, pp. 1–12. Halsall, F., J. Jansen and T. O’Connor, ‘Re-Discovering Aesthetics’, Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 1:3 (2004), pp. 77–85. Halsall, F., J. Jansen and T. O’Connor, ‘(Re)Discovering Aesthetics: An Introduction’, in F. Halsall, J. Jansen and T. O’Connor (eds.), Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy and Art Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, pp. 1–18. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment, transl. J.H. Bernard. New York: Prometheus, 2000 [1790]. Schaper, Eva. ‘The Kantian “As-If ” and Its Relevance for Aesthetics’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 65 (1964–1965), pp. 219–234. Schaper, Eva. ‘The Kantian Thing-in-Itself as a Philo- sophical Fiction’, The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 64 (Juli 1966), pp. 233–243. Vaihinger, Hans. The Philosophy of ‘As if’: A system of the Theoretical Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, transl. C.K. Ogden. Mansfield Centre, Ct: Martino Publishing, 2009 [1911]. Vermeulen, Timotheus. ‘As If ’, James Elkins and Harper Montgomery (eds.), Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013, pp. 168–171.

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46 47 * Exhibition view Joyful Wisdom, Rezan Has Museum, Istanbul. Mick Wilson, The Seminar, 2013. Marion von Osten, The Route of Friendship, 2013. Tiong Ang, Pavilion of Distance, Cross Roads and Hazy Maze, 2013. Participants Colophon

Andre Alves Doctoral researcher, Experimental Aesthetics Finnish Academy of Fine Arts/Helsinki University of the Arts, Finland Publisher Metropolis M Books Lonnie van Brummelen & Editor Siebren de Haan Visual artists Henk Slager and PhD researchers, University Final Editor of Amsterdam/MaHKU Utrecht, Annette W. Balkema the Netherlands Language Editing Id Est Clodagh Emoe Visual artist and Translation PhD researcher, GradCAM, Dublin, Thijs Vissia Ireland (Dutch/English Text Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan) Boris Groys Professor of Russian and Design Slavic Studies, , USA Joris Kritis Printing Irene Kopelman Visual artist, Die Keure, Brugge former Doctoral researcher (MaHKU Cover Utrecht/Finnish Academy of Fine Arts), Andres Alves, Untitled – from the series Amsterdam, the Netherlands Extractions, 2014

Hongjohn Lin Professor, Graduate Publication also made possible by School of Transdisciplinary Arts, Taipei HKU Utrecht University of the Arts National University of the Arts, Taiwan (Lectoraat Artistiek Onderzoek) and Mondriaan Fund Chus Martínez Head of the Institute of Art, FHNW Academy of Art and © 2015 Metropolis M, Lectoraat Design, Basel, Switzerland Artistiek Onderzoek (Utrecht) and the authors John Rajchman Adjunct Professor 20th Century Art and Philosophy, All rights reserved. No part of this Columbia University, New York, USA book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, Henk Slager Dean MaHKU, HKU or the facilitation thereof, including University of the Arts, Utrecht, information storage retrieval systems, the Netherlands without permission in writing from the publisher Timotheus Vermeulen Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies, University of ISBN 978-90-818302-4-9 Nijmegen, the Netherlands

Mick Wilson Head of Department, Valand Academy, Gothenburg University, Sweden

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