scholarly journals Public art as research in the open

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Hohlfeldt

In 1979, the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar staged his first public intervention in the context of military dictatorship. His inquiry on states of happiness anticipated a working method that Jaar has been following since. In taking Studies on Happiness as an early example of social aesthetics, this article will show that the work itself is not only seen as the product of making (poïesis), but that the process itself is seen as the embodiment of knowledge, the dwelling and outcome of an intended action. However, this action is not simply an act in the everyday (praxis), but as an intended action it is intelligent in itself and calls for the practical wisdom of acting (phronesis). As soon as the project includes a relational process and forms of participation, both in nature of unforeseeable outcome, the aim is no longer the production of a (common) object; rather, it is the social relation itself, established through the aesthetic or “boundary” object that puts into action the relation as well as the reflection on the conditions of its becoming. We will assess how play and phronesis can mediate between research and art by creating a situational knowledge, that is both critique and contributory: a research in the open.

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (118) ◽  
pp. 113-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristine Munkgård Pedersen

Roskilde Festival is the largest Danish music festival and provides an empirical basis for a discussion of the relationship between the social and aesthetic in contemporary cultural events. With the unfolding of the concept of social aesthetics, it becomes clear that the aesthetic potential of the festival is not limited to what is going on “on-stage”, but unfolds throughout the festival landscape. Based on ethnographical observation and phenomenological analysis of two different experience positions: “the panorama” and “the performative mass”, it is discussed how participation unfolds in the socio-aesthetic landscape of the festival. Through a review of the mass as an aesthetic phenomenon it is discussed how the aesthetic of participation succeed in transcending the dichotomy between subject and object ultimately leading to an aesthetic of dissolution.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 9-22
Author(s):  
D.A. Khoroshilov

Psychology of social cognition as the construction of the image of the social world requires addition of the concept of deep mediatization (N. Couldry, A. Hepp). In the frames of modern sociology and cultural-historical psychology it should be talked about the mediatized construction of the image of the world, mediated by the language of mass communication. The code of media language — not verbal, but visual — is analyzed in the epistemological and methodological contexts of the visual turn in the humanities. The realization of this trend in Russian psychology is the aesthetic paradigm of the everyday life (T. Martsinkovskaya, M. Guseltseva, D. Khoroshilov). Its main idea is the comparative analysis of the languages of the scientific concepts and art and media images, what allows to explicate visibility optics of the everyday life in the modern society. The article concludes with the aesthetics and psychological explanation of the phenomena of deep mediatization of social cognition from Nicola Gogol to the popular TV series «Black mirror».


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Julie Bates

Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett's portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett's play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett's play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis.


2021 ◽  
pp. 016224392110051
Author(s):  
Annekatrin Skeide

Unlike sonographic examinations, sonic fetal heartbeat monitoring has received relatively little attention from scholars in the social sciences. Using the case of fetal heartbeat monitoring as part of midwifery prenatal care in Germany, this contribution introduces music as an analytical tool for exploring the aesthetic dimensions of obstetrical surveillance practices. Based on ethnographic stories, three orchestrations are compared in which three different instruments help audiences to listen to what becomes fetal heartbeat music and to qualify fetal and pregnant lives in relation to each other. In the Doppler-based orchestration, audible heartbeat music is taken as a sign of a child in need of parental love and care cultivated to listen. The Pinard horn makes esoteric fetal music that can be appreciated by the midwife as a skilled instrumentalist alone and helps to enact a child hidden in the belly. The cardiotocograph brings about soothing music and a reassuring relationship with a child but also durable scripts of juridical beauty. This material-semiotic analysis amplifies how well-being is shaped in midwifery prenatal care practices.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Paul Ingram

Abstract Theodor Adorno’s philistine functions as the other of art, or as the ideal embodiment of everything that the bourgeois aesthetic subject is not. He insists on the truth-content of the derogation, while recognising its unjust social foundation, and seeking to reflect that tension in a self-critical turn. His model of advanced art is negatively delimited by the philistinism of art with a cause and the philistinism of art for enjoyment, which represent the poles of the aesthetic and the social. The philistine is also the counterpart to the connoisseur, with the interplay between them pointing to his preferred approach to aesthetics, in which an affinity for art and alienness to it are combined without compromise. However, Adorno fails to realise fully the critical potential of the philistine as the immanent negation of art and aesthetics.


2002 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Guillet de Monthoux ◽  
Antonio Strati

Ethnicities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146879682199990
Author(s):  
Sagnik Dutta

This article is an ethnographic exploration of a women’s sharia court in Mumbai, a part of a network of such courts run by women qazi (Islamic judges) established across India by members of an Islamic feminist movement called the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (Indian Muslim Women’s Movement). Building upon observations of adjudication, counselling, and mediation offered in cases of divorce and maintenance by the woman qazi (judge), and the claims made by women litigants on the court, this article explores the imaginaries of the heterosexual family and gendered kinship roles that constitute the everyday social life of Islamic feminism. I show how the heterosexual family is conceptualised as a fragile and violent institution, and divorce is considered an escape route from the same. I also trace how gendered kinship roles in the heterosexual conjugal family are overturned as men fail in their conventional roles as providers and women become breadwinners in the family. In tracing the range of negotiations around the gendered family, I argue that the social life of Islamic feminism eludes the discourses and categories of statist legal reform. I contribute to existing scholarship on Islamic feminism by exploring the tension between the institutionalist and everyday aspects of Islamic feminist movements, and by exploring the range of kinship negotiations around the gendered family that take place in the shadow of the rhetoric of ‘law reform’ for Muslim communities in India.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-30
Author(s):  
Isaura Gomes de Carvalho Aquino ◽  
Maria Rosângela Batistoni ◽  
Graziela Scheffer Machado

The aim of the current article is to present results of three studies about the so-called Reconceptualisation Movement in Brazil, based on the historical rescue of significant and exemplifying expressions used in the country from 1960 to 1970. The analysed studies have focused on investigating the economic and social significance of the military dictatorship to Brazilian society. They aimed at unveiling the historical background, sociopolitical bases and theoretical-methodological references guiding social service professional projects in the country at that time. The herein conducted analysis was based on documentary and bibliographic sources, collections, and testimonials to identify the strengths of projects that were in compliance with, and in opposition to, each other due to the tense theoretical and ideological dispute for hegemony in the Brazilian social service renewal process.


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