Aesthetic Exercise Research Articles

‘Keeping up with the Korean Yeojas’: the paradox of Korean women’s participation of aesthetic exercise in contemporary Korea

Over the past decade, there has been a noticeable increase in the engagement of Korean women (‘yeoja’ in Korean translation) in physical activities. Despite discussions emphasizing active exercise and fitness, motivations for women’s participation have often been centered around weight management and dieting. This study explores the experiences of Korean women participating in aesthetic exercise – physical activities such as yoga, Pilates, and pole fitness which focus on female-appropriate weight management. Aesthetic exercise participation emerges as a complex and paradoxical phenomenon, blending feminized workouts, ideal body images, and individual aspirations to attain social standards. Participants express ambivalence, viewing exercise as both a ‘healthy way of losing’ and a means to ‘keep up with’ societal ideals of the female body. Thus, it highlights the intricate interplay between societal expectations, personal goals, and the pursuit of an envisioned ideal, offering insights into the dynamic nature of women’s involvement in aesthetic exercise in the Korean context.

(en)CANTO ESCONDIDO

Este artigo resulta da reflexão sobre a construção da obra “(en)CANTO ESCONDIDO”, uma escultura/instalação que intervém in situ captando as relações dinâmicas entre materiais, paisagem e habitats de Coruche, em Portugal. O projeto apela às relações permeáveis entre natureza e cultura. O fluxo de presença/ausência dos animais que visitaram a escultura eram parte integrante da lógica da instalação. A obra pretendeu potenciar relações de observação dinâmicas em que o observador se tornava observado, constatando a sua evidente parte na natureza. “(en)CANTO ESCONDIDO” é simultaneamente um modelo de observatório urbano das migrações (insetos e pássaros) e uma construção arquitetural que invoca relações de convivência e partilha interespécie/intergeracional que incitam a interação e a descoberta de novas relações. A instalação pretendeu levar os observadores a um espaço de imersão, onde a realidade da natureza circundante se funde nas memórias e ficções de cada visitante. Foi uma experiência de partilha e um exercício estético e de reflexão sobre a sustentabilidade na nossa prática que se tornou uma experiência comunitária de partilha com imenso potencial narrativo e reflexivo.

In defence of natural beauty: Aesthetic obligation and the law on the designation of protected landscapes in England and Wales

Natural beauty has been the central legal criterion for the designation of ‘protected landscapes’ in England and Wales for over 70 years. This approach is subject to criticism that natural beauty is an outdated and subjective notion. Yet, there is surely merit in celebrating the beauty in nature that exists in these areas. Nevertheless, the legal approach necessitates some interrogation of the notion of natural beauty, its relationship to the landscape and the nature of the aesthetic exercise required to underline a regulatory system for the designation of protected landscapes. This article draws on literature in both aesthetic philosophy and landscape studies to provide such an analysis, arguing that an aesthetic observation of natural beauty can form the basis of a reasoned, robust and transparent process for the designation of protected landscapes and account for natural and cultural heritage concerns.

Aesthetic Abductions. Art-Bio-Graphy between Creativity and Complexity

The ‘Caviardage – Metodo Tina Festa’ is known as a poetic creative writing game, in the international range of ‘found poetry’ practices, distinguishing itself for the epistemological richness of the foundation and its reverberations in adult life-long-learning. Tactile and epistemic exercise at the same time, method no-method, it reveals a philosophically relevant plan: abductive research practice of observation of the ‘unnoticed’ before, this game is similar to science, what Bateson intended as an aesthetic exercise that breaks and interrupts the taxonomic attitude to put ‘thoughts in line’, allows to overcome a ‘cartographic image of knowledge’. The essay also presents the results of an empirical research that has been investigating the connections between this practice and its reverberations concerning processes of meta-thoughts, exploring the connections between ‘poetry’ as meta-modus of knowledge and un-learning as meta-modus of the most evolved reflexivity. In this perspective, the meaning of ‘aesthetic’ is problematized in the contexts of education in adulthood, combining the intuitions of Bateson and the theoreticians of complexity with a game/language… only apparently simple. https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.17.12.3

Amor, modo de glosar: sobre escavar as terras dos corpos e das línguas

Resumo: A partir da imagem do ato de escavar em um poema de Paul Celan, suscita-se uma potência do amor como ação poética capaz de criar novos afetos e sujeitos políticos. Tal noção de amor, avessa à tradição romântica, faz tensionar o limite do indivíduo e tudo aquilo que o caracteriza como pessoa e, por isso, insere-se numa perspectiva crítica em relação ao humanismo e ao projeto teológico-político do capital neoliberal. Para isso, o pensamento de alguns autores aqui se faz reverberar, como é o caso de Nietzsche, Deleuze, Derrida e Safatle. Esse escavar, como ato amoroso, implica num exercício ético e estético sobre os estratos da língua e do corpo como forma de fazer fugir outras potências que fazem marulhar uma política do inumano.

Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century by Gabriel Trop

Reviewed by: Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century by Gabriel Trop Christian P. Weber Gabriel Trop. Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. 388 pp. This book is an ode to poetry in more than just one respect. First, poetry is its subject matter. For the author, each poetic text represents an "experiment in thought and language" that should be regarded "not as an object of investigation whose essence might one day be found, nor as a set of formal properties or generic qualities that one day might be defined, but rather, as a way of life endowed with its own patterns and tendencies, rewards and risks, ecstasies and anxieties" (4). Engagement with poetry and art in general amounts to an openended process of aesthetic exercise, "a form of askesis" (4), in the sense that the artwork challenges the subject to continually modify his or her preformed attitudes toward reality and to improve patterns of perception, cognition, and being in general. This notion of "aesthetic exercise" had already been of central importance in Baumgarten's Aesthetica (1750) and continued to be so for the likes of Schiller, Fichte, and Schelling, whose aesthetic theories Trop touches on at various points. Trop also finds the same attitude reflected in the poetry of the era, from the Anacreontics Hagedorn and Gleim to the Romantics Novalis and Hölderlin. In meticulous close readings, Trop "probes, analyzes, gathers, and associates in order to uncover the latent and potential exercise value harbored in each work, a tentative and provisional response to the question: what sort of self does this text call into being, what practices of life does it invoke?" (11). As its journal-like cover reflects, the book also presents a personal account of the [End Page 321] author's poetic way of life—that is, the story of his aesthetic experiences and hermeneutic exercises with poems and other forms of literature. Trop views Foucault, Hadot, and Sloterdijk as prominent predecessors for a humanistic reevaluation of aesthetic, spiritual, even athletic exercises. Sloterdijk's reading of Rilke's poem "Archaischer Torso Apollos" in Du mußt dein Leben ändern (Suhrkamp, 2009), in particular, serves as a model for Trop's book. However, Trop's project differs from these predecessors in that it is entirely Romantic. His concluding remark in the section on Novalis formulates the general theme and ethos of his book that he repeatedly incants throughout: One cannot stress enough that art—the particular cognitive exercise that it performs—does not merely present its own absolute as merely unrepresentable or incomprehensible. To reduce the romantic absolute to unrepresentable Being lures readers into divesting themselves of the need to interpret the work, to move in its rhythms and concepts, to produce something in its light, to cease to be wholly other to it: to live with the work, in the work. One might be misled to believe that interpreting a poem always misses the point, because after all, the meaning of the poem ultimately remains ineffable. However, in the world of poetry, it is quite the contrary: missing the point is the point. The ineffability of art cannot live in a world of silence. On the contrary, what Novalis shows is that this ineffability, if it is functioning correctly, generates fictions, multiplies differences, produces interpretations, incites speech. The sphere of art does not represent the unrepresentable as much as make present the unrepresentable as an intensity in the mind, a fever for thought, a contraction of the skin, a tension of the muscles, an organism in a state of maximum attraction. (207–8) I render this passage in its entirety because it illustrates the overall poetic tone as the second feature of this ode to poetry. Literary verve has become rather uncommon in academic writing and may incite criticism, but I do not feel that this style compromises the clarity of discourse in any way. On the contrary, there are many passages in which the use of poetic language facilitates and enhances the lucidity of complex issues and arguments. My only stylistic criticisms are that...

Poetry as a way of life: aesthetics and askesis in the German eighteenth century

Trop, Gabriel. Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2015. 388pp. $89.95 (hardcover).Poetry as a Way of Life rereads the works of Holderlin, Novalis, and various rococo poets (e.g., Gleim, Uz, von Hagedorn, Brockes) through a methodological lens that takes each poem as an aesthetic exercise or ensemble of such exercises. Most generally, these exercises stimulate processes of cognition and imagination in the reader as well as retraining her perception of sensuous particulars. An opening discussion of Baumgarten's aesthetic reclamation of the sensuous modalities of knowing allows Trop to isolate various malleable dispositions of mind and body opened up and reconfigured by the aesthetic exercises staged in and as every poem. Such dispositions include inner sensibility, or attentiveness to one's own perceptual processes, the imagination as rendering the absent present, and memory as a cognitive operation involved in the retrospective generation of coherence from seemingly discrete, unrelated past events.This suggestive reconstruction of Baumgarten's aesthetics in terms of a typology of aesthetic exercises forms the starting point for a rich theoretical discussion, in which Trop distinguishes his notion of the aesthetic exercise from other paradigms of performativity, such as Sloterdijk's idea of anthropotechnics, Hadot's spiritual exercise, and Butler's account of performance. Aesthetic exercises for Trop are neither instrumental (directed at a desired end-state or habit, the instilling of a new capacity such as bicycle-riding or arrow-shooting) nor teleological (oriented toward an immanent end, such as eudaimonia or the virtuous life). Unlike pragmatically oriented exercises, aesthetic exercises possess no immanent telos. Unlike the second paradigm of the spiritual exercise as discussed in Pierre Hadot's studies of ancient philosophy, Trop's aesthetic exercises are not characterized by any claim to universal validity, for they do not seek to convert their reader/listener via her guided restaging of an uncontestable epistemic insight or truth-event. A third paradigm consists in socio-discursive practices of subjectformation, such as those described by Butler's notion of performance, Foucault's care of the self, and Bourdieu's habitus, which similarly revoke any claim to universal validity for all subjects, instead accounting for how the dynamics of subject-formation may be hijacked or reinvented by subjects themselves. Trop notes that such accounts of socio-discursive self-fashioning nonetheless remain parasitic on historically given normative codes of conduct. Unlike these practices, aesthetic exercises are not dependent on given normative codes, their normative horizon instead projected (and perturbed) by the poems themselves.When Trop provocatively asks, sort of self does this text call into being, what practices of life does it invoke? (11), he thus introduces a paradigm of poetic performativity that brackets questions of poetic performance's pragmatic orientation or immanent telos, the epistemic validity of its truth content or truth-event, as well as its normative status. The payoff achieved through this bracketing is primarily methodological, allowing Trop to sidestep productively questions of how form relates to content (whether functioning as its mimetic enactment or its performative contradiction), instead interpreting each poem as a dynamic bundle of operations that interlock, reinforce or even undermine one another, and ultimately affect the reader. Indeed, an implicit aesthetics of reception seems to underlie the idea of an aesthetic exercise, one in which the reader's reception of a poem is an essentially active posture of receptivity, a willed openness to be reconfigured in one's sensorium and cognitive apparatus.The heart of the book lies in its richly sophisticated yet clear close readings. In three core chapters on Holderlin, Novalis, and rococo poets such as Gleim, Uz, and Brockes, Trop not only devotes close attention to individual poems and poetic lines, but integrates systematic investigation of philosophical and poetological theories into the minutiae of close reading. …

Body image dissatisfaction and aesthetic exercise in adolescents: are they related?

This study investigated if boys and girls who practice exercises with aesthetic propose report higher levels of body dissatisfaction compared to their inactive peers. A total of 199 adolescents (89 boys), mean age 16.1 years, completed measures of body dissatisfaction and psychological commitment to exercise. Results demonstrated that active boys presented lower dissatisfaction than their inactive peers; and active girls were significantly more dissatisfied than inactive ones. Active boys were more satisfied than active girls. The majority of active girls reported a desire for a slimmer silhouette; while active boys were equally divided between those who desired a heavier silhouette and those who were satisfied. Psychological commitment to exercise did not differ between satisfied and dissatisfied active adolescents. Thus, girls who practice aesthetic exercises must be looked at as a high risk population to the development of health harmful behaviors and eating disorders.

Três formas do experimentalismo na MPB da década de 1970

Neste artigo, pretende-se analisar aspectos e características da produção experimental de compositores e grupos da música popular brasileira dos anos 1970, período marcado pela ditadura militar e pela expansão das indústrias midiáticas ligadas ao campo da canção popular (gravadoras e emissoras de TV). Parte-se da discussão teórica sobre experimentalismo feita por Umberto Eco e do conceito de “canção crítica”, de Santuza C. Naves, para pensar a “canção experimental”. Serão apontadas três linhas gerais da experimentação praticada por esses criadores: 1) relação entre tradição e modernidade, como herança tropicalista, mas efetivada em outro patamar; 2) experimentalismo como exercício estético realizado especificamente na materialidade do código poético e musical da canção visando determinados significados; 3) uso criativo do corpo e da performance como elementos produtores de sentido, em sintonia com a leitura nacional da contracultura.
 
 Palavras-chave
 Música popular brasileira. Experimentalismo. Contracultura. Anos 1970.

Never Been Rich: The Life and Work of a Southern Ruralist Writer, Harry Harrison Kroll (review)

Reviewed by: Never Been Rich: The Life and Work of a Southern Ruralist Writer, Harry Harrison Kroll Ricky Cox Never Been Rich: The Life and Work of a Southern Ruralist Writer, Harry Harrison Kroll. By Richard L. Saunders. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011. pp. xvi, 205.) Richard Saunders concedes that Harry Harrison Kroll’s lack of an enduring reputation and his settled status as a popular rather than a literary writer make him an unlikely subject of scholarly interest. But Saunders argues persuasively that Kroll is actually a very worthy subject, both for his staggering productivity, “nearly 30 books, [and] over 900 short stories” (xiv), and for his approach to writing as a source of income first and an aesthetic exercise second. Kroll’s history of publication in innumerable pulp magazines and with second-tier novel publishers offers an alternative view of creative writing as blue collar, made-to-order piecework, and illuminates the shifting tastes of editors who both shaped and responded to the demands of an unsophisticated, average reading public over more than half a century. Tom Douglass’s back-cover assertion that “Appalachian scholars, southern literary scholars, and those interested in education history and the history of the book will find this work of significant interest” is a pretty fair assessment. Though not a native of Appalachia, Kroll based This Ancient Grudge, described by Saunders as the finest of Kroll’s novels, on the Hatfield-McCoy feud. And while the nature and degree of his influence on Appalachian literary icons Jesse Stuart, James Still, and Don West are, predictably, debatable, all three knew him as a member of the English faculty at Lincoln Memorial University. Stuart and West both dedicated books to him. The story of Kroll’s childhood and youth in western Tennessee and northern Alabama illuminates the slow collapse of the agrarian economy of the Old South and explains biases and loyalties that would characterize and perhaps limit his most serious fiction. His earning of a high school diploma after marriage, and his dogged pursuit of bachelor’s and master’s degrees while writing, teaching, and raising a family, and the phenomenal energy and self-confidence that characterized both his teaching and his writing will be the most satisfying facets of the book for readers who want Kroll, an indifferent son and a self-absorbed, unfaithful husband, to be the hero of his own story. Kroll was unrelenting and unrepentant in his approach to writing as a means of making money; his long and apparently successful career as a college teacher may also be studied as a closely calculated means of utilizing one’s talents and inclinations to best economic advantage. If this was a cynical approach on Kroll’s part, and a harsh assessment on the part of Saunders, it is at least honest on both their parts, as well as provocative to anyone teaching or pursuing writing-related [End Page 91] work as a means of supporting a writing career that isn’t supporting itself. On the other side of that coin, those who teach creative writing, in the absence of a personal or professional compulsion to produce and publish regularly, may be led to reflect on their own motivations and methods. Kroll’s belief, as a teacher, that quantity leads to quality, and his faith, as a marketer, that any writing that sells is good writing, may be as off-putting to some of Saunders’s readers as they were to many of Kroll’s colleagues and contemporaries. Whatever may be said of his writing, Harry Harrison Kroll was a realist in his personal and professional lives, with all the self-absorption and instinct for self-preservation that the label implies. As resurrected by Richard Saunders, Kroll himself appears to be more flawed, more complex, and more memorable than any character he was capable of creating. The single flaw of any significance in Never Been Rich is the excessive length of some chapters. Readers who lack the time to read chapters three and four (seventy-one and sixty-three pages respectively) at one sitting may flounder in the crossing. Just keep rowing. Ricky Cox Radford University Copyright © 2012 West Virginia University...

X-ray crystallography of DNA-drug complexes

Here we have stressed important differences between protein and DNA crystallography. Crystal growth and data collection methodologies are not directly transferable between the two subfields. In addition, we note that analysis of symmetry and packing of DNA crystals can be useful and a uniquely aesthetic exercise.

Looking at Archives in Art

Studying the depiction of records, documents, books, reading, and writing in art is more than an aesthetic exercise for archivists. The authors examine a selection of British and American portraits and genre paintings, discussing their presentation of records as well as the contexts in which the paintings were created and the importance of the records depicted. Archivists can use this "iconography of archives" to understand contemporary perceptions of records by artists, sitters, and viewers, thereby placing textual records more fully in their historical context.

Cross-Country Skiing: An Exercise in Aesthetics and Challenges.

Cross-Country Skiing: An Exercise in Aesthetics and Challenges.