Beyond spectatorship: an exploration of embodied engagement with art

[摘要] English: According to proponents of the so-called 'sensory turn' the varied layers of aperson's experience of the social and material world produced via the senses oftaste, touch, hearing and smell have largely been neglected in academic research onart. It is precisely because a person's embodied and sensual engagement isincreasingly being recognised as co-constitutive of the dynamic relationshipoccurring between people and art that dealing with the visual alone has been foundto be insufficient and has brought about a shift in interest toward the other senses.Working between the disciplines of art history and visual culture studies, thisresearch engages with art in ways that exceed the visual in order to understand theembodied and engaged interactions at work between a person and art. I argue thatscholarly investigations of the visual field have, until recently, often avoidedexplorations of the affective, multisensorial body of a viewer in relation to what s/hesees even though many art practices invite the engagement and participation of thewhole body beyond spectatorship only.In a close analysis of two installations, a land art piece, one video and one entireparticipatory exhibition the possible ways in which to theorise the involvement of thewhole person in aesthetic experience and not only the mind, intellect orconsciousness are explored. It is argued that a re-conception of art andspectatorship as embodied interaction provides a far more nuanced understanding ofpeople's experiences of art than ideologically and interpretative driven 'readings'only.The theme of embodied spectatorship and contemporary art is approached inparticular through the lenses of the sensory turn, the pictorial turn, the corporeal turn,empathy theory, affect theory, phenomenology and aesthetic embodiment andengagement. By placing various examples of contemporary art in dialogue withthese theoretical perspectives the limitations of traditional notions regardingaesthetic spectatorship are exposed. This leads to the beginning of a broaderconversation about the role and status of a whole embodied sensual being in her/hisencounter with specific materialities of art.My basic theoretical standpoint is that a person's embodied and engaged experienceis the starting point from which investigations of art can productively proceed. Inother words, by means of a predominantly phenomenological approach thatdescribes aesthetic situations and encounters, it is argued that direct experiencedoes not simply contribute to, but rather has a primacy and authority in encounterswith art, and should, therefore, be investigated.

[发布机构] University of the Free State