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January 17, 2008
In her Reshaping Spectatorship: Immersive and Distributed Aesthetics in the interesting Fibre Culture Edwina Bartlem says that:
It is worth noting that critical distance has remained a dominant discourse in art history and theory. Modern aesthetic philosophy has often struggled to account for sensory-aesthetics in the body of the spectator, tending to privilege rational thought over sensory perception and a body that simultaneously thinks and feels ..... Modern aesthetic theory that asserts the need for critical distance tends to perpetuate a mind/body dualism where the mind of the spectator is seen as the primary site of interpretation. The inability of modern aesthetic theory to adequately deal with sensory-aesthetics is somewhat ironic given that Alexander Baumgarten coined the term ‘aesthetics’ (from the Greek ‘aesthesis’) to describe his project of creating a theory of ‘sensory knowledge’
And:
...Kant also acknowledges that the subject’s experience of ‘pleasure and displeasure’ are central to the aesthetic experience, however he suggests that there is a serial temporality to sensation, reflective thought and meaning...Kantian aesthetics implies that a form of emotional detachment and critical distance are necessary on the part of the viewer to adequately judge art and to experience a sublime encounter (Kant, 1957: 41-42). Thus, the viewer must maintain a position that is outside of the artwork or event.
The idea of a secure place outside of an event, culture or artwork has, of course, been critiqued by Friedrich Nietzsche, Pierre Bourdieu and postmodern theorists such as Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Why not contemplate an art object or environment from within the architecture of the work? We do that with film do we not?
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Bourdieu quotes from Sein und Zeit this passage in "The Love of Art" [chapter 6. conclusion]which I think is a fascinating reading of Heidegger and can provide a methodology for human sciences in the quest for tracing reality through philosophy's task [what Heidegger calls in "introduction to metaphysics": "a thoughtful opening of the avnues and vistas of a knowing..."(p.11) ]:
"When, for instance, a man wears a pair of spectacles which are so close to him physically that they are 'sitting on his noice', they are environmentally more remote from him than the picture on the opposite wall. their proximity is normally so waekly preceived as to go unnoticed." (the love of art p.108)
it is distinction that rules in our epoch. polemos of earth and world must be traced. the reduction of geist to tool brings disctinction which is the total forgetting of Being.