Participatory Aesthetics: The Function of Imagination

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).