Abstract
The chapter argues that the aesthetics of participatory art discloses a veiled and hidden aspect of Kantian aesthetics. Kant regarded the purposeless interplay of imagination and understanding as the primary foundation for subjective aesthetic judgments. The chapter shows that this interplay between imagination and understanding not only yields pleasurable contemplation, but it also harbours agency in the form of possible action. However, this poietic dimension can only be made aesthetically available, if the conceptual part of a work of art points that out. Participatory works of art conceptually and performatively include participant actions into the unfolding of the particular artwork. After clarifying the notion of participation, the chapter elaborates on the aesthetic function and significance of the interplay between imagination (the human faculty of creating perceptual representations of past, present and future (possible) phenomena) and conceptual understanding. In participatory aesthetics, imagination supports agency by imagining a possibility field and conceptual understanding reveals itself to be an instance of fictionalisation, cognitively framing perception and action. In the chapter theoretical elaborations are initiated by and its findings exemplified through an analysis of Maria Sester’s participatory artwork, Sester (2003).
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Notes
- 1.
However, my list is not a qualitative judgement of this work of art.
- 2.
Participation (n.): late fourteenth century, from Old French participacion (thirteenth century), and directly from Late Latin participationem (nominative participatio); “partaking”, action noun from the past participle stem of Latin participare “to participate in, share in, partake of; to make partaker, to share, impart”, from particeps (genitive participis) “partaker, comrade, fellow soldier”; also, as an adjective, “sharing, partaking”, from pars (genitive partis) “part” (see part [n.]) + -cip, weak form of stem of capere, or “to take” (see capable ). (Harper, 2001–2018).
- 3.
This particular societal status can no longer be characterised as autonomous in a narrow sense, because artistic endeavours range from secluded art-making, such as paintings and writings, to collaborations with science, private and public organisations of various kinds.
- 4.
Foucault impressively describes the discursive development from the Renaissance to modernism’s sense-making by means of different kinds of representation techniques. Today’s discourse, he asserts, is based on the concept of “man”, who produces, employs and is produced by language as a recursive system of references, and who has lost (the illusion of) direct access to the surrounding world.
- 5.
Here, of course, Lacan’s elaborations of the observed objects looking back at the observer, hereby including the observer in the picture by establishing an image-screen, where the represented object and the observer co-exist (Lacan in Foster, 1996).
- 6.
Aristotle distinguishes among theoria, praxis and poiesis, where poiesis indicates the work of artisans and creation by manual labour. This differs from praxis, which denotes the acts of free citizens as a good and moral lifestyle. Plato, on the other hand, uses the term poiesis in a wider sense. In the Plato (1998), he asserts that all poiesis is creation that strives for the eternal. Besides poiesis as procreation, and as the achievement of fame and reputation lasting longer than earthly life, poiesis can be understood as bringing forth the beautiful as an understanding of ideal, essential forms. Plato’s poiesis combines material production with recognition.
- 7.
I use the term realisation to denote both cognitive comprehension and a palpable achievement or change as the result of an intentional act.
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Heinrich, F. (2018). Participatory Aesthetics: The Function of Imagination. In: Tateo, L. (eds) An Old Melody in a New Song. Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92339-0_6
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