Relational Aesthetics Research Articles

Aesthetics and Politics of Participation in Benoît Maubrey’s Speaker Sculptures

Abstract The article discusses the aesthetic and political aspects of Speaker Sculptures – an ongoing series of participatory site-specific sound artworks by the artist Benoît Maubrey. Informed by pragmatist aesthetics and combining artwork analyses with ethnographic observations, the text focuses on the expressive affordances of the sculptures and the way the participants act upon them. Utilizing a variety of communication technologies, Speaker Sculptures bridge the gaps between the public, private and virtual spaces and allow the participants to perform in the public space without being physically present in them. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s theory of the public as the political, Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics and Chantal Mouffe’s antagonism theory, the article discusses the political implications of such performances.

“Thus far and no further”: Inquiry into a dreamless society

AbstractHumans are highly social primates who naturally seek out groups in which to live. Our individual psychology is inherently intertwined with that of the group, forming an inextricable link between the two. In keeping with Bion's insights into group dynamics, we approach contemporary conflicts by examining them through both social and psychoanalytic lenses. Drawing on Foucault's and Deleuze's analyses of societies, as well as considering the impact of technology and the COVID‐19 pandemic, we illustrate how modern societies function under the influence of three behaviors observed by Bion. Activated as a result of a psychological disaster, the ruins consist of the symptomatologic triad of arrogance, stupidity, and curiosity. We have called this functioning Bion's disastrous triad. We suggest that when it is set in motion, it leads to a withdrawal from the beauty of life, as Bion well expresses with the phrase “Thus far and no further.” Using Meltzer's notion of aesthetic conflict, we suggest that while operating under the mandates of the triad, recognition of the other becomes an impossibility. A plea for relationships based on mutual recognition—namely, aesthetic relationships—is in order.

Most Alive: Vibrant Taxidermy and Art as Futural Practice in Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things

ABSTRACT In her book Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett asks “How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies?” In this essay, I consider a narrower version of this question by examining Kirstin Arnett’s novel Mostly Dead Things, focusing on how depictions of art in the novel may provide pathways for addressing public problems by engaging seriously with the vitality of nonhumans. While it would be naive to suggest that art or depictions of art might be a cure-all for contemporary concerns, art is, I contend, a site where we might better connect with nonhumans and with one another to solve public problems. Leaning broadly on both relational aesthetics and object-oriented philosophies, I argue that objects and actants, including the nonhuman animals in the novel’s taxidermy shop as well as the relationships between and among characters, contribute to a participatory aesthetic of collaboration and aesthetic embodiment. I suggest, further, that such aesthetic embodiment may be an effective path toward post-anthropocentric – and perhaps even post-androcentric – futures when approached as a collaboration among existents ranging from presumably inanimate objects to humans.

Delight at the New: A Review of Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture

This article is a review of the comics studies collection Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture (2024), edited by Jonathan Najaran. The collection features a range of articles by comics scholars on the social, cultural and aesthetic relationships between comics and avant-garde art practice- specifically modernist art practice.

Influence of the Concept Acceptability on Magic FM 102.9 Radio Station Communication Aba, Through Media Aesthetics

This study was centered on the influence of the concept of acceptability on Magic FM 102.9 radio station, communication through media aesthetics. The study was able to relate aesthetics to media as conjugal twins that cannot be separated from each other no matter what. It also related aesthetics as a form of communication which sees it as something or object that has the capacity of producing an outstanding feeling of pleasure which makes communication attractive and believable to the audience. The study also reviewed aesthetics as a sign of communication that makes use of colour, design and shapes, lighting, films/movies, advertising/marketing, celebrities, parks and events. It was also found that the tools that enhance communication as aesthetics include camera, colour, lighting, music and sound. The interview granted to the 5 selected respondents from Magic Fm on the components which enhance aesthetics revealed that lighting, music, microphone and colour were amongst. It was concluded that it is empirical to say that without media aesthetics, communication cannot be acceptable and believable by the audience. It was also recommended that media practitioners and owners should endeavour to prioritize the use of media aesthetics in order to achieve their aim of attracting and sustaining the interest of their audience as well as packaging and presenting their messages in a way they would be saleable through the use of synchronizing aesthetic tools and qualities.

Study of Lighting Design for Interior Spaces

Due to the continuous progress of lighting fixture technology, people's requirements for commercial space design are also rising, and the comfortable, convenient, artistic, and technological combination of space is more and more emphasized by designers. The author has collected a large amount of visual subjective evaluation data through actual investigation and experimentation and conducted extensive and in-depth research on the light source's low radiation, luminous flux, luminous intensity, illuminance, luminance, color temperature, color deviation, color tolerance, beam angle, and maintenance coefficient. This paper takes the lighting quality parameters as the benchmark, analyzes the formal aesthetic relationship between commercial space and lighting design, and has a certain reference value for both lighting workers and academic research.

Aesthetic relationship between personality emotions and contemporary graphic design patterns on the surfaces of textiles

In this work, five different types of animated graphic design ideas (traditional, 2D, 3D, stop motion, motion) were examined on three different textile fabrics (cotton, silk, polyester) through digital printing. Psychological-emotional expressions (openness, conscientiousness, extroversions, agreeableness, and neuroticism) were investigated that influenced the perceptual criteria. Lastly, a quantitative investigation was carried out from a sample of 300 students whose ages varied from 20 to 24 years old for an analysis of aesthetic appeal through a 5-point Likert scale. The results revealed that motion animation design has the most effective aesthetic appeal while the stop motion design pattern has the least aesthetic appeal. Silk fabric samples have better graphic consequences whereas polyester fabric samples have the least. Moreover, individuals with neuroticism emotional personality have the least effective response while agreeableness has the utmost for the sense of aesthetics. 71% of students were accustomed to aesthetic appeal as compared to structural fabrics.

Art Gallery Education Between Translation and Dialogism: Artwork, Learning and Pedagogy

ABSTRACT Drawing on insights drawn from multidisciplinary studies of the arts and translation studies, this article aims to conceptualize the work of translation within art gallery education. It unpacks and characterizes a mode of translation that is unique and necessary for an engaging art gallery education, taking multiple and subtle forms, operating on different facets of the conception and delivery of art gallery education activities. This includes a resourceful way of translating different values that could pull art gallery education in different directions, i.e. making different values translatable into one another, including the aesthetic value of the artwork, the value of learning and education for diverse and multiple users and participants, as well as the values that participants bring into an art gallery education. An indispensable component of art gallery education still consists of bringing into play an element of propositional knowledge about art, not as an end in itself based on the traditional parameters of the cultivation of taste and appreciation, but to develop experimental and creative dialogical forms of engagement and relational aesthetics. The ultimate aim is to use the arts as a platform for a pedagogic translation driven by the principles of dialogism and a collaborative ethos.

Polyphony

This special issue explores the concept of polyphony in writing art history, using it as a methodological lens to examine diverse voices, along with their intricate interactions and contradictions, archival practices, and the collective creation of knowledge. Ranging from dialogic and experimental approaches to academic styles in writing, the authors embrace a spectrum of narratives in their writing to challenge canonical art history. Exploration of themes such as otherness, cross-cultural encounters, and relational aesthetics are also central, enriching the discourse with varied perspectives. Relational approaches to art history writing exemplify efforts in some of the articles to transcend conventional academic boundaries, offering writing nearby artistic practices and merging written with oral narratives. The issue also examines the role of archives, reflecting on racial and gender-based power dynamics and the concepts of living archive and archival rewriting. Several articles explore the implications of this approach, highlighting the need for a multi-dimensional narrative that acknowledges the complexities of the interactions between local and global discourses, transnational, transcultural, and diasporic identities. In summary, this special issue invites the reader to reconsider the traditional frameworks of art history and to embrace a more inclusive, resonant, and interconnected understanding of the field.

Editorial

Enter any contemporary art museum, gallery, or biennale in 2024 and chances are that the live arts will be center “stage.” While theater, dance, music, and performance art were historically presented in visual arts contexts as fringe or one-off events, since the turn of the twenty-first century—and gaining momentum over the past decade—there has been a growing tendency to “exhibit” live art. As choreographers, directors, and composers who have built their careers in the visual art world—which is significantly more monied than the performing arts world—take home major prizes and awards, leading museums are inaugurating spaces designed exclusively to house installation and performance. But architectural spaces are also ideological spaces with tacit value systems that influence conventions of performance and spectatorship, as well as perceptual experience. What happens when live arts are transplanted into the modernist project of the white cube, characterized as it is by its putative neutrality, objectivity, universality, disembodiment, and erasure of context (see O'Doherty [1976] 1999)? Today's eventized museum showcases works of art characterized by durationality (they are circumscribed by time), corporeality (they feature live, gesturing bodies), and relationality (they foreground the intersubjective exchange) that engender new modes of what Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) called “relational aesthetics.” In so doing, these works challenge traditional definitions of the “collection,” the “archive,” the “museum,” and even “contemporary art.”

Investigating Color-Blind User-Interface Accessibility via Simulated Interfaces

Over 300 million people who live with color vision deficiency (CVD) have a decreased ability to distinguish between colors, limiting their ability to interact with websites and software packages. User-interface designers have taken various approaches to tackle the issue, with most offering a high-contrast mode. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) outline some best practices for maintaining accessibility that have been adopted and recommended by several governments; however, it is currently uncertain how this impacts perceived user functionality and if this could result in a reduced aesthetic look. In the absence of subjective data, we aim to investigate how a CVD observer might rate the functionality and aesthetics of existing UIs. However, the design of a comparative study of CVD vs. non-CVD populations is inherently hard; therefore, we build on the successful field of physiologically based CVD models and propose a novel simulation-based experimental protocol, where non-CVD observers rate the relative aesthetics and functionality of screenshots of 20 popular websites as seen in full color vs. with simulated CVD. Our results show that relative aesthetics and functionality correlate positively and that an operating-system-wide high-contrast mode can reduce both aesthetics and functionality. While our results are only valid in the context of simulated CVD screenshots, the approach has the benefit of being easily deployable, and can help to spot a number of common pitfalls in production. Finally, we propose a AAA–A classification of the interfaces we analyzed.

Creating change: exploring the merit, mechanism, and necessity of artistic research in addressing ecological crises

Among the many complementary forms of knowledge-making, the artistic practice plays an essential, yet often overlooked role in influencing ecologically oriented decision-making. In my own ongoing visual research, I’ve experienced first-hand how documentary photography is uniquely able to reveal deep, qualitative insights that would otherwise remain obscure to canonical research methodologies. Through both a critical and reflexive analysis of my photographic practice exploring the complex ethical, ecological, and aesthetic relationships between people and bees, this essay explores how artistic research can elegantly—and effectively—catalyse more eco-oriented behaviours, policies, and outcomes.

Arts-Based Methods in Migration Research. A Methodological Analysis on Participatory Visual Methods and Their Transformative Potentials and Limits in Studying Human Mobility

In the last decades, the growing use of participatory methodologies and creative methods in migration research has opened innovative ways to collect, analyze, and disseminate data. These approaches encourage experimental, interdisciplinary, and collaborative work through artistic methods to study human mobility and expand the community of inquiry and interpretation, often intervening in contexts of social injustice and exclusion. This article is intended as a reflection on the potentialities and limits of the use of arts-based methods in migration research. The contribution opens with a review of how participatory visual methods have been framed in the field of migration studies. The second part explores an example of a collaborative study that adopted photovoice and sensory mapping to reflect on the concept of “welcoming spaces”. Finally, it analyses arts-based methods as a potential space for social change, focusing on three main dimensions: collective learning, relational aesthetics, and knowledge co-construction.

Aesthetic Assemblages: Relational Aesthetics of the Israeli Movement Practice Gaga

This paper presents a study of the aesthetics of the free-form improvisational dance practice Gaga as an example of contemporary neo-spirituality. The study is based on aesthetic data collected in recreational Gaga classes at the Suzanne Dellal Centre in Tel Aviv. The study shows that the aesthetics of practices are relational and depend on a variety of heterogeneous factors; collective and shared aesthetics persist despite individualization. The paper develops assemblage thinking as a theoretical and practical framework for approaching aesthetics. It combines the specific analytical approach of aesthetic analysis with the theoretical concept of assemblage and applies it to an example of neo-spirituality. It evolves the concept of “aesthetic assemblage” to address the challenges of studying practices that focus on movement, body, and experience. It demonstrates that studying aesthetic assemblages of neo-spiritual practices helps to foster an understanding of social and cultural dynamics in the context of religion.

Ethnography as Playful Relational Encounter: Collaboration and Translation between Film and Writing

This co-authored paper presents a PhD student in anthropology and his primary interlocutor describing collaborative filmmaking as a space ethnographic encounter. They explore how their “ethnographic B movie” (Epp 2024) approach afforded a novel opportunity to perform subjectivity beyond norms of researcher and interlocutor relations and representation. The article was inspired by discussions around Epp’s recent conference presentation about the challenges of representing Ross between film and dissertation writing. An engagement with that presentation, situated within Nicholas Bourriaud’s concept of relational aesthetics (2002), forms the atmosphere of this article. As a relational text, the article creates an encounter that speaks across research relations in which the subject of research reflects on being represented in ethnographic film and writing. This article describes an arts-based fieldwork approach where it’s not the outcome of research that matters most but instead cultivating the relational encounter between ethnographer and interlocutor becomes the critical intervention.

Solarpunk visions in youth fiction. The pedagogical utopia of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

The essay examines the traits and pedagogical potential of the solarpunk artistic and narrative movement by analyzing the specific case study of Hayao Miyazaki's animated film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). The article first presents solarpunk and its association with environmental themes and successively applies the genre's theoretical framework to the case study, as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind shares some of the movement's approaches and aesthetics in relation to sustainability. The essay concludes with a pedagogical reflection on the potential of solarpunk to imagine and create sustainable worlds. Although this artistic movement is not explicitly aimed at a young audience, solarpunk stories (or a solarpunk reading of different narratives) could lead to a new understanding of the ongoing climate change and to a constructive call for environmental responsibility starting from a young age.

Robert Walsers Sprachbildlichkeit: Im Trialog mit Thomas Hirschhorns Ruinen und Mark Wallingers Schattenspielen

Abstract In the linguistic imagery of his texts and also in his consistent biographical retreat, the author Robert Walser presents the riddles of an aesthetic relationship between self and other to the world. From the diversity of his extremely relational view of the world emerges a tension-rich charge of his texts, which is taken up by numerous visual artists. The tension consists in the simultaneity of abstraction and vividness, of cosmographic expansion and extreme reduction (e. g., in the micrograms), of similarity as well as difference. Thomas Hirschhorn and Mark Wallinger are quite similar in their love for Walser, but they are far apart in their artistic consequences. They shape the extremely relational and yet always precarious view of the world either in adhesions or volatility, physicality or shadow, publicity or isolation, ruins or paths, concretizations or abstractions. A politically effective aesthetic connects the two artists with Robert Walser in a poetic trialogue, for it is a matter of communication and discursive exposition, not of enlightenment or agitation.

The temporary exhibition as a tool for communication and relationship between science and society: the case study of the Darwin-Dohrn Museum in Naples (Italy)

ABSTRACT The temporary exhibition ‘Sharks of the Mediterranean sea’ features scientific and artistic collections. Priority focus is the knowledge of the biodiversity of the selachians of the Mediterranean sea and the Gulf of Naples (Italy), through a museum itinerary that illustrates their biology, ecology, vulnerability, protection, and scientific research. The aim here is to describe the scientific communication strategies used to inform/educate the public but above all to promote a reflection that stimulates the latter to be a protagonist of a concrete action of care and custody of the selachians through a paradigm shift of the person-sea and person-shark relationship. The result is an exhibition set up in the graphic/photographic, videographic, and scenographic/museographic aspects, focusing on the visitor’s experience, his or her psychology, emotional and aesthetic relationships with the museum spaces as well as the solicitations of curiosity triggered by the interaction with the collections.

Interpreting David Smith’s Photography Through a Medium-centred Model of Communication

American sculptor David Smith moved fluidly between media to elicit the kind of aesthetic reaction that he believed was unique to and inherent in modern art. As remediation of his sculpture, Smith’s photography attains its own performative power by establishing a new aesthetic relationship with its spectators. This article applies Lars Elleström’s medium-centred model of communication to the analysis of the intermedial quality of David Smith’s photography. By emphasizing the significance of mediality and communication, it offers a new interpretation of the transmutation of modern sculpture as an alternative to modernist aesthetics. In this way, this case study of David Smith’s photography functions as an initiative of expanding the research of intermediality beyond formalistic analysis, by integrating art history with communication and media studies.

Aesthetic Values in the Myroslav Skoryk’s Creativity

The ideological sources and origins of the issues of values in European culture at the beginning of the 20th century became the basis of this study. It is noted that the challenges regarding the specifics of the existence of value orientations were raised by neo-Kantian philosophers, in particular by Heinrich Rickert. Attention is focused on the priority role of art and music in the formation of artistic values, as well as on their aesthetic, ethical, psychological, pedagogical influence and on the creation of the ground for artistic dialogues in cultural life. The idea of value as a form of affirmation of human nature is substantiated in terms of the fundamental basis necessary for universal human culture. The content and functions, which include general cultural values: truth, beauty, good, as well as aesthetic: catharsis, kalokagathia, aura, based on the achievements of European musical art, are revealed by the author in the context of personal creativity. It is indicated that value relations are always emotional, connected with feelings of direct joyous delight, surprise; values always have a certain sacred mode, act as a shrine. It is emphasized that art in general and musical art in particular are closely related to moral and ethical guidelines, with the understanding that the concept of love in the structure of an aesthetic relationship acts as its concretization. Using the example of one of the earliest works of the composer Myroslav Skoryk (the cantata "Spring" based on a poem by Ivan Franko), it is demonstrated that the artistic material is imbued with a sensitive, joyful and loving perception of the surrounding nature; an open, trusting attitude to the surrounding world, which is generally a characteristic feature of art, especially modern art. The article examines the creative heritage of the Ukrainian artist as a carrier of valuable expression of Ukrainian culture, its intertextual, avant-garde character. It is proved that in the works of M. Skoryk, national values are organically combined with universal values.