International Conference and Art Exhibition: Everyday Aesthetics and Collective Gestures

Topic of the conference

In a time of political and ecological crisis, it is important to question the idea of art as an autonomous realm and the idea of the artist as a citizen possessing superior insight. By revisiting the inaugural notion of aisthesis as a sensitive and cognitive experience, we argue that aesthetics cannot be confined to preexisting rules or to a metaphysically autonomous realm. Rather, aesthetics is embedded in human situations, affects, and practices—as such it constantly remakes our forms of life. Everyday Aesthetics has proven to be a growing trend in philosophy during the twenty-first century. For this line of research, it provides a valuable philosophical framework: it explores the aesthetic aspects of our daily lives, emphasizing the relational and collective nature of aesthetic experiences. The practice of collectiveness and the framework of everyday aesthetics are essential for overcoming rigid dualisms: passivityactivity; perception-expression; mind-body; individual-environment; function-form; art-non-art; general-particular; quantity-quality; real-virtual; technology-biology; consumption-sustainability. The consequences are not only aesthetic and cultural, but also political, ecological and cognitive. The notion of gesture is crucial because it accounts for multiple kinds of relation between intellect and sensation. Our everyday lives are inherently collective, interconnected for better or worse and the process of sense-making through gestures arises in a spectrum of relations and through multiple efforts that involve the risk of miscommunication. How do gestures enable us to think and create? And how is the materiality of gesture collectively shared? The concept of gesture enables both a precise differentiation between habits, experiences, actions, movements, manners of living and being, and a reconception of aesthetics as a living and dynamic realm, as an experience that possesses an intrinsically relational nature.

The methods and practices of participatory art are also important from this research perspective, in that they consider collective experience as an emancipatory practice. Historically, and following pragmatism, the movements of Happenings and Fluxus and postmodern dance already contributed to repositioning the experience of the art within the continuum of ordinary life. As shown by Jacques Rancière (2000), sharing (or distribution) is both a question of aesthetics and politics. Democracy and participation cannot be reduced to a prefiguration of unity (as in many concepts of ‘community’), but refer to the behavior of individuals or collectives at the intersection of activity and passivity, of beingmoved and moving. We would then avoid to reduce aesthetics to the experience of a sole subject facing an object and considering it more as a situated knowledge. The varieties of aesthetic experiences show that the vital and the social are constantly interwoven into an ensemble that is in a condition of perpetual tension, retreat and potential transformation.

Researchers and artists will propose contributions that explore how aesthetic practices are arranged and transformed when they seek to distance themselves from the world of art in order to immerse themselves in, and transform, human forms of life. The papers or artworks explore the coexistence of heterogeneous materials, processes of interaction and negotiation, and the complexity of collectively shared situations.

Various themes covered

• Non-judgmental aesthetic experience related to bodily sensations
• Participatory and socially-based art
• Aesthetics in relation to issues of racism, gender inequality
• Environmental aesthetics and ecofeminist art practice
• The role of the ethics of care in art practice
• Situatedness, situated knowledge and relationality
• Immersive, multisensory, imaginative and affective attention.
• Co-creation and engagement
• Land, ecological and environmental art forms engaged in biodiversity remediation.
• Conversation, reciprocity and togetherness
• Governance, democracy, the public sphere, daily political practices
• Reciprocity, exchange, potlatch
• Collaboration, problem-solving, problem-finding
• Weighing pros and cons, process-oriented practice, work-in-progress

Demoseries is pleased to co-sponsor this conference, for which two of its members, Sandra Laugier and Tatsiana Zhuroliova, will be presenting papers.

Sandra Laugier (Université Paris 1, ERC Demoseries, France)

"Ordinary aesthetics and the democratization of culture"

The expansion of art audiences and the creation of new forms, agents, and models of artistic practice have transformed the very definition of art, challenging elitist notions of "great art." Dewey’ s Art and Experience was essential to this transformation. This understanding and defense of an art that has not “lost contact with its audience” (Panofsky), film at first, extends to widespread cultural practices (Internet videos, videogames, TV series, popular music, etc.). They are sites where artistic and hermeneutic authority is reappropriated, and where agents are re-empowered through the constitution of individual experiences. Yet the question of their status as art remains. Many continue to think of ethics as principally concerned with rules and their infringement, as a domain constituted by judgements made some distance from the everyday. But ordinary ethics by contrast examines the ethical as inhering in the everyday. We can see a further need for thinking about the possibility of ordinary aesthetics, a field which though intimately tied up with ethics, merits its own inquiry. The educational value of popular culture is not anecdotal. Indeed, it seems to me to define what must be understood both by “popular” and by “culture” (in the sense of Bildung) in the expression “popular culture.” The way in which Cavell has claimed the philosophical value of Hollywood cinema—placing it on the level of the greatest works of thought. Cavell is less concerned with inverting artistic hierarchies than with the transformation of self necessitated by our encounter with new experiences.

Tatsiana Zhurauliova (Université Paris 1, ERC Demoseries, France)

"The Ordinary Aesthetics of Space: Contesting, Disrupting, Repairing"

This presentation will focus on three contemporary artistic interventions into public space that challenge the notion of art as distinct from the realm of ordinary life: Mark Wallinger’ site-specific work The World Turned Upside Down on the campus of The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE); Space Invaders by the French artist known as Invader, which are omnipresent in Paris and other cities across the globe; and mosaics of the artist known as Ememem, often referred to as the “pavement surgeon”, which serve to fill and repair cracks and potholes on sidewalks across Europe. These works represent an artistic intervention into the public space, but through their embeddedness within the shared space and the flow of everyday life, their meaning and aesthetic effect are continuously amended and redefined by the ordinary gestures of other individuals.

To attend the conference:

Sorbonne University, 12 Place du Panthéon 75005, Room 6 and Sorbonne Art Galery.

To attend the art exhibition:

Galerie Michel Journiac, 5 rue des Bergers, 75015.

École des Arts de la Sorbonne, 45 rue des Bergers, 75015.

To register and find more information, please refer to the website of the event by clicking here.

You can discover and download the program right below.