Access Aesthetics Research Articles

Aesthetics and Participation in Accessible Art Experiences

The action research project titled A Touch of Museum to Scale aims to improve the accessibility of the Museum to Scale art collection at the University of Antwerp. This project collaborates with various stakeholders to prototype tactile objects and an inclusive art guide for five artworks. It seeks to engage users of diverse abilities, investigate universal access services, and promote the integration of accessibility and artistic creation. The audio guide integrates visual descriptions and information for people with and without a visual impairment and integrates the artistic contributions of artists with and without disabilities. Artists also create tactile objects, which are an artistic and tactile translation of original artwork and a piece of art in their own right. The authors discuss project activities, such as personal observations, interviews, questionnaires, brainstorming sessions, and theoretical considerations based on literature and experience. The research is exploratory and invites both researchers and practitioners to reflect on participation and the aesthetics of access. Lay summary A Touch of Museum to Scale is a practice-based project that aims to improve the accessibility of the Museum to Scale art collection at the University of Antwerp. By working with various stakeholders, the team developed a prototype of tactile objects and an inclusive art guide for five artworks. This project is an experiment, in which we address several pertinent questions: how to create an audio guide that engages diverse abilities? How to make a guide that can be used by all? How to bring accessibility and artistic creation closer together? The result is an audio guide that combines visual descriptions and information for people with and without a visual impairment. It also includes the artistic contributions of artists with and without disabilities. In addition to the audio guide, artists have created tactile artworks to complement the original collection. In this text, the authors discuss the project activities and link them to insights from scientific literature. The authors hope to inspire a deeper reflection about accessibility and aesthetics in accessible art.

Introduction: Access Aesthetics— Toward a Prefigurative Cultural Politics

Introduction to the issue on access aesthetics.

Embracing the Distance: Accessing Dances of Connection

I look at an image of my performance of Free Hugs, an interactive dance installation that sought to activate Tkaronto’s Lisgar Park amid the city’s attempts to reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic in the summer of 2020. More than a year later, a lot has changed with the development of vaccines and the lifting of restrictions/regulations for in-person gatherings. And yet I am still uncertain of how to connect with others amid growing concerns about the pandemic’s fourth wave. Hoping that I will rediscover some insight from my performance to relieve me of my uncertainty, I return to this image. It captures a moment of my attempt to share a hug with my audience—to connect with them in an intimate way amid the borders of physical distance imposed on us and by us. Looking at this visual representation of my performance, however, I feel my distance from the experience of my dancing body and all that it tries to teach me. I desire an embodied connection with the gestures of that performance to guide me forward into our uncertain future. Turning to disability arts practices inspired by questions and aesthetics of access, I release a practice through which we might simultaneously rest within and wrestle through the creation, navigation, and transcendence of distance to access connection.

Interrogating wholeness through access aesthetics: Kaite O’Reilly’s In Water I’m Weightless

ABSTRACTCommissioned for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, Kaite O’Reilly’s play In Water I’m Weightless uses access aesthetics as well as content to interrogate the relationship between wholeness and disability. Featuring an entirely d/Deaf and disabled cast, the play provides a multitude of ways through which the performance can be accessed. Through its form and content, this paper argues, In Water I’m Weightless challenges the idea that a piece of theatre must be consumed and understood as a whole and breaks up hierarchies that dictate how a play is to be accessed and privilege the nondisabled body in the theatre.

Recycled Images: from orphan works to found footage

The focus of this article will be on the artistic practice of found footage film-making—with which is understood the practice of creating new films with extant material—and the ‘aesthetics of access’. Lucas Hilderbrand introduces this term in his 2009 publication Inherent Vice, in which he assembles issues of copyright, preservation and bootlegging and applies it to the specific case study of VHS. When he speaks of aesthetics of access he does so in reference to the formal characteristics of the image. That is how the term is intended here as well. So for instance, film-maker Matthias Müller shot the footage he has used to compile his found footage film Home Stories (1990) with a 16 mm film camera off a television screen. Whether this mode of production was favoured for its specific visual impact or for circumventing having to obtain permission to re-use the (mainly Hollywood feature) film material, the resulting slightly degraded look of the duplicated material is a direct result of how the material was accessed, hence its ‘aesthetics of access’. This article argues that the legal provenance of archival material, and potential ways of circumventing legal restrictions in obtaining that material, can be traced in the ultimate form of found footage films. It also argues that in their new amalgamated states, the films emphasise such concepts as ownership and authorship and that they can be seen as illustrative in their allusions to the ways that institutional context, copyright and film form are interdependent.

The Poetics of Caxton's “Publique”: The Construction of Audience in the Prologues of William Caxton

Studies of Caxton's readership have focused largely on issues of patronage and book ownership. This essay examines the construction of a public readership within the prologues and epilogues that William Caxton appends to his publications. In these prologues certain concepts emerge in the gradual formulation of a print “publique”, the most significant being Caxton's aesthetics of access—a principle of framing and reformulating previous texts in order to render them readily intelligible to all and suitable to the “publique wele, as well of the nobles as of the comyn people”. This aesthetic cuts across class and dialect barriers to the extent that it would seem to obviate them. Thus a totalizing language abounds in Caxton's writing: each publication is profitable for all manner of people, or it behooves every estate and degree, or it contains all matters good and profitable, or it shall be understandable to every man, and so on. Along with the construction of his public readership, Caxton's repeated emphasis on his own “symplenes” serves as a stand-in for his public audience—the interested lay reader. The essay concludes with a discussion of the prologue to Caxton's most famous and influential publication, Le Morte Darthur, arguing that the imperative of access best explains the printer's motive for publication and the rationale for his editorial handling of Malory's text.

‘Killing Ourselves is Not Subversive’: Riot Grrrl from Zine to Screen and the Commodification of Female Transgression

:This article draws on material from the Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University's Fayles Library to examine the culture of ‘zine’ production in riot grrrl communities in the United States during the 1990s. After investigating the relationship between the political issues and aesthetic strategies explored by riot grrrl literary producers, the author analyses the points of tension arising within the movement, which become illuminated by zines’ revelatory confessional modes, or what Mimi Thi Nguyen has called riot grrrl's ‘aesthetics of access’. The author subsequently enquires after the implications for riot grrrl politics of understanding experiences of oppression and transgressive behaviour as cultural commodities. Finally, the author goes on to trace the commodification of the transgressive feminist gesture in mainstream popular culture and contemporary online feminist activism in the United States.

Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival

This essay ventures a critique of the existing historiography of riot grrrl and how the movement is narrated both “then” and “now” to contain and subsume the disruptions of race. The first counter-story commences with and departs from that scene of intimacy that is the semi-secret heart of riot grrrl's resonance, an aesthetics of access – to the means of production and creative labor, but also to more ephemeral properties of expertise and self-knowledge – through which the personal and the political are collapsed. The author argues that the resistive properties of intimacy might also replicate its intrusive ones, and conceive of change narrowly as the adjustment of the individual subject – recalibrating her capacity for love or shame, for instance – to the structural determinations that constitute the historical present. In doing so, the author shows how race confounded such intimacy in order to demarcate the boundaries of riot grrrl aesthetics as both form and critique. In a second counter-story, with riot grrrl now becoming the subject of so much retrospection, the author argues that how the critiques of women of color are narrated is important to how we remember feminisms and how we produce feminist futures. Here the author locates riot grrrl within a broader critique of the historiography of feminist movement, to question then the progressive teleologies of origin, episode, and succession that would limit the internal disturbances within feminisms to its critics, or to the past. Discussions about the contours and contents of these historiographical impulses are always political ones, insofar as they establish what forces should be considered memorable, and what crises be deemed responsible for unsettling feminist movements. These discussions are happening now, and will continue no doubt into the future, and the author offers this interruption as an alternate genealogy through which we might pursue a politics as “destroyers of the status quo.”

BOOK REVIEWS

Journal Article BOOK REVIEWS Get access Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche. By ANDREW BOWIE. Manchester U. P. 1990. pp. 284. £35.00. NICHOLAS DAVEY NICHOLAS DAVEY Cardiff Institute Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 31, Issue 4, October 1991, Pages 370–373, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/31.4.370 Published: 01 October 1991

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Get access Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. By ANNE SHEPPARD. Pp viii+172Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Cloth, £15; paper, £4.95 net. BERNARD RICHARDS BERNARD RICHARDS Brasenose CollegeOxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XLI, Issue 161, February 1990, Pages 152–154, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XLI.161.152 Published: 01 February 1990

BOOK REVIEW

Journal Article BOOK REVIEW Get access Aesthetics and the Good Life By MARCIA MUELDER BATON Associated University Presses 1989. pp. 209. $34.50 K. JONES K. JONES University of Ulster at Coleraine Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 30, Issue 4, October 1990, Pages 368–369, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/30.4.368 Published: 01 October 1990

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS Get access Aesthetics. Edited by HAROLD OSBORNE. Oxford Readings in Philosophy. Series Editor: G. J. Warnock. Oxford University Press, 1972. Pp. 186. 75p. EVA SCHAPER EVA SCHAPER UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Mind, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 1, 1975, Pages 475–476, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LXXXIV.1.475 Published: 01 January 1975

BOOK REVIEWS

Journal Article BOOK REVIEWS Get access Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism. By ARNOLD ISENBERG. University of Chicago Press. 1973. pp. xxxix + 322. A. G. PLEYDELL-PEARCE A. G. PLEYDELL-PEARCE University of Birmingham Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 15, Issue 3, SUMMER 1975, Pages 275–278, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/15.3.275 Published: 01 March 1975

Reviews

Journal Article Reviews Get access AESTHETICS: AN INTRODUCTION by George Dickie . Bobbs-Merrill , 1971 ; pp. ix, 200 ; $2.45. DON LOCKE DON LOCKE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 21, Issue 12, December 1974, Pages 474–475, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/21-12-474 Published: 01 December 1974

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Journal Article REVIEWS OF BOOKS Get access AESTHETICS AND THEORY OF ART. By Max Dessoir. Translated by Stephen A. Emery. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970. 453 pp. EDWARD A. LIPPMAN EDWARD A. LIPPMAN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Musical Quarterly, Volume LIX, Issue 1, January 1973, Pages 139–144, https://doi.org/10.1093/mq/LIX.1.139 Published: 01 January 1973

BOOK REVIEWS

Journal Article BOOK REVIEWS Get access Aesthetics and Theory of Art (Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft). By MAX DESSOIR. Translated by STEPHEN A. EMERY with a Foreword by Thomas Munro. Wayne State University Press. Detroit. 1970. pp. 453. $13.95. EVA SCHAPER EVA SCHAPER University of Glasgow Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 11, Issue 3, SUMMER 1971, Pages 311–314, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/11.3.311 Published: 01 March 1971

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS Get access Aesthetics. By W. CHARLTON. Hutchinson University Library. 1970. pp. 135 65p. STEWART R. SUTHERLAND STEWART R. SUTHERLAND University of stirling Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 11, Issue 3, SUMMER 1971, Pages 288–289, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/11.3.288 Published: 01 March 1971

BOOK REVIEWS

Journal Article BOOK REVIEWS Get access Aesthetics and the Arts. Edited by LEE A. JACOBUS McGraw-Hill. 1968. pp. 315. T. J. DIFFEY T. J. DIFFEY University of Sussex Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 8, Issue 4, October 1968, Pages 413–414, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/8.4.413 Published: 01 October 1968

BOOK REVIEWS

Journal Article BOOK REVIEWS Get access Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism. A Critical Introduction. By JEROME STOLNITZ. Houghton Mifflin. Boston. 1959. pp. viii + 510 and 27 plates. $6.95. RUTH SAW RUTH SAW Birkbeck College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 2, Issue 1, January 1962, Pages 87–88, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/2.1.87 Published: 01 January 1962

Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism.

Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Aesthetics : Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. By Monroe C. Beardsley. (New York : Harcourt, Brace & Company. 1958. Pp. xvi + 614. N.P.). Art and the Human Enterprise. By Iredell Jenkins. (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. London : O.U.P. 1958. Pp. xiv + 318. Price 45s). Ronald W. Hepburn Ronald W. Hepburn Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 10, Issue 41, October 1960, Page 384, https://doi.org/10.2307/2216427 Published: 01 October 1960