The relation between Richard Shuster's Somaesthetics and selected artworks by Carsten Höller, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pan Gongkai and Superflex
Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: The participants of the plenary session "Somaesthetics" organized by Richard Shusterman included Tanehisa Otabe, Else Marie Bukdahl and Krystyna Wilkoszewska.The author of somaesthetics explained that this new term was necessary to cover the broad range of problems related to our body, our "tool of tools".The body is the basis for our actions, perceptions and thoughts.Shusterman indicates that although in the main current of philosophy the problems of body were neglected, at the very beginning of Western philosophy as well as in the Eastern thought, it enjoyed attention.This tradition should be continued, since "our bodies express the fundamental ambiguity of human existence": the body is both the subject and the object, it gives us the sense of species community as well as individual uniqueness, it makes us different from animals but, at the same time, relates us to them through evolution, it draws the limits to our freedom, but it also makes this freedom possible, and the same regards our perception (cognition).Shusterman emphasizes the meliorative character of somaesthetics; as an interdisciplinary research area it serves to improve the culture of life of both individuals and communities.The participants of the panel session spoke, in turn, about: the position of somaesthetics in the history of Western and Eastern thought and culture, possibility of somaesthetic interpretation of works of art, trans-disciplinary character of somaesthetics on the boundary between the humanities and natural sciences, especially in the context of new achievements in biotechnology and theory of evolution.For the debate concerning "Aesthetics Beyond Aesthetics" Wolfgang Welsch invited Peng Feng and Eduardo Kac, who are -though in slightly different proportions -both artists and theoreticians.He did it in accord with his conviction that nowadays artists as well as scientists contribute to better understanding of changes taking place in culture.Welsch reminded that he used the formula "aesthetics beyond aesthetics" for the first time in 1995 during the ICA in Lahti, having in mind the expansion of aesthetic research to the areas beyond art, especially since they are undergoing progressive aesthetization.Aesthetics should follow the path of the avant-garde of the 20th century, which transgressed the boundaries of autonomous art ("art beyond art").The plenary panel was supposed to be a continuation of this idea, especially that certain phenomena had become intensified.And so, both philosophers and artists perform a "transition from substance to process ontology".Moreover, nowadays we move from thinking in the categories of opposition to that based on the idea of continuity.This regards
Author: Bukdahl, Else Marie
Institution: Aalborg University
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4412343918