Aesthetic Determinants in the Pottery Tradition of the Urhobo People of Nigeria’S Niger Delta

Pottery practice is one of the three-dimensional enterprises of the Urhobo people who inhabit part of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The people are also known for the production of massive sculptures in wood and mud. Many of the pottery products of the people are, as is the case with their sculptures, configurations of volumes. The expressiveness of these pots is, in part, determined by the way in which the constituting volumes meet each other. In most literature that is available on this art practice of the people, this structural feature is diminished in importance or not considered as a contributing element to the general aesthetics of the ware. This paper interrogates the structural elements that constitute the pots. This is done by dissembling the pots into their structural components (volumes) and analyzing the manner of their coming together to constitute the pot. The findings show that two basic transitions are used as aesthetic attributes in the pottery products from the study area. The study also reaffirms that the extent to which an object satisfies the purpose for which it is made is a strong determinant of the aesthetic value ascribed to the object by a people.

Enstranglements: Performing Within, and Exiting From, the Arts-in-Health “Setting”

The following text explores performative art works commissioned within a specific “arts and health” cultural setting, namely that of a medical school within a British university. It examines the degree to which the professional autonomy of the artists (and curator) was “instrumentalized” and diminished as a result of having to fit into normative frames set by institutional agendas (in this case, that of “the neoliberal university”). We ask to what extent do such “entanglements,” feel more like “enstranglements,” suffocating the artist’s capacity to envision the world afresh or any differently? What kinds of pressures allow for certain kinds of “evidence” to be read and made visible, (and not others)? Are You Feeling Better? was a 2016 programme curated by Frances Williams, challenging simplistic expectations that the arts hold any automatic power of their own to make “things better” in healthcare. It included two performative projects – The Secret Society of Imperfect Nurses, by Anthony Schrag with student nurses at Kings College London, and Hiding in Plain Sight by Becky Shaw (plus film with Rose Butler) with doctoral researchers in nursing and midwifery. These projects were situated in a climate of United Kingdom National Health Service cuts and austerity measures where the advancement of social prescribing looks dangerously like the government abnegating responsibility and offering art as amelioration. The text therefore examines the critical “stage” on which these arts-health projects were performed and the extent to which critical reflection is welcomed within institutional contexts, how learning is framed, expressed aesthetically, as well as understood as art practice (as much as “education” or “learning”). It further examines how artistic projects might offer sites of resistance, rejection and mechanisms of support against constricting institutional norms and practices that seek to instrumentalise artistic works to their own ends.

Re-Presenting Art History

Can reenactment both as reactivation of images and restaging of exhibitions be considered an alternative way of tackling the critical task to re-present art history (i.e., to present it anew) in the here and now, over and over and over again? The gesture of restoring visibility to something no longer present, reactivating or reembodying it as an object/image in and for the present, is here proposed as a (political) act of restitution and historical recontextualization. Examining the boundaries between past and present, original and copy (as well as originality and copyright), repetition and variation, authenticity and auraticity, presence and absence, canon and appropriation, durée and transience, the paper focuses on remediation, reinterpretation, and reconstruction as creative gestures and cultural promises in contemporary art practice, curatorship, and museology.

Realms Without Totality

This essay posits tensions in art, education, and politics by using philosophical discourse to suggest that the way to create transformative events for social change is to understand Lyotard's diagnosis of the current age and Rancière's call to critical art practice. By proposing new strategies and tactics such as 'post-art' and 'strange tools', the author tries to demonstrate in the text the indirect approaches advocated by Lyotard and Rancière in tackling the current post-political world.

The Touch of Intelligence

I have yet to be persuaded that what arts therapists are doing with their clients either actually counts as art—rather than an applied form of occupational therapy—or seems likely to have any long-term effect on easing their suffering, other than by distraction and temporary companionship. I don’t for a moment doubt the relevance of the arts, properly so called, for individual and collective wellbeing—one of the aims of this paper is to spell out what that might mean—butan art practice structured around the conventions of psychoanalysis seems to me entirely mistaken because, as a basis of legitimacy, it favours rationality and modelling over feeling and making good things.Rational, analytical ways of knowing are a direct contradiction to the intuitive and imaginative procedures of art, where touch rather than talk does all the work. The arts offer to effect change in the patient from within rather than from without, via empathetic attunement between the therapist and the patient rather by than argument and persuasion on the one hand or compliance on the other.

Revising Postsocialism

This article reflects on the current explanatory value of concepts such as postsocialism and Eastern Europe by exploring how they are represented in contemporary art projects in Estonia. Through an overview of recent exhibitions in which I collaborated with local artists and curators, the research considers generational differences in relation to cultural discourses of the postsocialist experience. Methodologically, artists and curators were not simply my informants in the field, but makers of analytical knowledge themselves in their practice. Exhibitions were also approached as contact zones, whereby new cultural forms are simultaneously reflected and constructed. Critically, this inquiry gathers new ways of representing and conceptualising cultural changes in Estonia and novel perspectives of interpreting the relations to the Soviet past. The focus is put on art practice because of its capacity of bringing together global and local frames of reference simultaneously. The research also draws attention to the inbetweenness of the first post-Soviet generation (those born near the time of the breakup of the USSR); they are revising established cultural forms as well as historical representations through mixing practices, and therefore updating traditional ideas of identity and attachment to places.

Sympoietic Art Practice in Co-expressive Re-worlding with Hegel’s “Vegetal Subject”

“Sympoietic art practice”, construed as co-creative making-together-with plants, contributes to posthumanist discourse by forming cross-species partnerships which re-configure exploitative relations with plants. The posthumanist commitment of sympoietic practice to live equitably with the more-than-human world is inherently opposed to the tradition of anthropocentrism widely associated with Hegel’s idealization of reason and culture. But when Hegelian philosophy comingles with the radically different assumptions of sympoietic art practice in this exploratory paper, a co-expressive “worlding with plants” emerges. A transformative re-reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature reveals that the English translators have smoothed away the vibrant concept of a “vegetal subject” explicitly used by Hegel in the original German. The resulting interpretive fissure makes space for a creative scrutiny of human exceptionalism, humanist and posthumanist conceptions of plant subjectivity and human-plant relations. Our transdisciplinary article concludes with a performative knitting together and composting of shreds of Hegelian text with vibrantly participative strands of living couch grass.

Ruptures and Wrong-Footings: Destabilizing Disciplinary Cultures

In this transcribed conversation, three artists from the research group The Cultural Negotiation of Science (UK) consult each other on the different generational perspectives they bring to the contested field of arts-science research. Traversing territories between art-practice, physics, genetics and critical theory, their practice-based strategies actively destabilize the binary nature of cross-disciplinary dialogue in productive ways, allowing the spaces between artistic and scientific modes of enquiry to become sites of learning, both within and beyond academic institutions.