Interspaces of Art And Social Life – Challenges For Contemporary Aesthetics

Abstract

The paper deals with the consequences of an exceptional rise of hybrid forms of in-between spaces in contemporariness, which are populated with objects and phenomena from a wide and very heterogeneous field of (visual) arts. Theoretical reflection on this field requires cross-disciplinary networking and transdisciplinary treatment, intersectional co-operation of disciplines, and the deployment of new methodological approaches that often result from the recombination of already existing methods and procedures. We are dealing with the consequences of the productive fading of the boundaries of different areas (especially aesthetics, political philosophy, new urban studies and contemporary art history), i.e. by introducing new hybrid research subjects, which expound the potentials of ever new, yet unexplored areas, which can also be marked on the level of terminology. The discussion aims to contribute to the analysis of participatory art from the perspective of intermediate spaces between art and everyday social reality. The focus is on the critical reflection of such art with examples from Slovenia in the light of the need to find new ways of analyzing art, which would no longer be related only to visuality. The author comes from the view that participatory art due to its hybrid and transdisciplinary nature cannot be adequately evaluated within the traditional framework of art criticisms, and thus strives for more general concepts in the field of philosophy and political theory. Deployment of contemporary approaches, which contribute significantly to the reflection on such art (besides Rancière’s politics of aesthetics, the affirmation of aesthetics based on critical discourses of post-Marxist, post-socialist and post-transitional perspectives), is particularly helpful for the author. Article received: April 12, 2019; Article accepted: June 23, 2019; Published online: September 15, 2019; Original scholarly paper