Interspaces of Art And Social Life – Challenges For Contemporary Aesthetics

Mojca  Puncer

doi:10.25038/am.v0i19.313

Authors

Mojca Puncer

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i19.313

Keywords:

art in social space, politics of aesthetics, post-transition, hybridity, transdisciplinarity, participation, interspaces of art, visual arts

Abstract

The paper deals with the consequences of an exceptional rise of hybrid forms of in-between spaces in contemporariness, which are populated with objects and phenomena from a wide and very heterogeneous field of (visual) arts. Theoretical reflection on this field requires cross-disciplinary networking and transdisciplinary treatment, intersectional co-operation of disciplines, and the deployment of new methodological approaches that often result from the recombination of already existing methods and procedures. We are dealing with the consequences of the productive fading of the boundaries of different areas (especially aesthetics, political philosophy, new urban studies and contemporary art history), i.e. by introducing new hybrid research subjects, which expound the potentials of ever new, yet unexplored areas, which can also be marked on the level of terminology.

The discussion aims to contribute to the analysis of participatory art from the perspective of intermediate spaces between art and everyday social reality. The focus is on the critical reflection of such art with examples from Slovenia in the light of the need to find new ways of analyzing art, which would no longer be related only to visuality. The author comes from the view that participatory art due to its hybrid and transdisciplinary nature cannot be adequately evaluated within the traditional framework of art criticisms, and thus strives for more general concepts in the field of philosophy and political theory. Deployment of contemporary approaches, which contribute significantly to the reflection on such art (besides Rancière’s politics of aesthetics, the affirmation of aesthetics based on critical discourses of post-Marxist, post-socialist and post-transitional perspectives), is particularly helpful for the author.

Article received: April 12, 2019; Article accepted: June 23, 2019; Published online: September 15, 2019; Original scholarly paper

Author Biography

Mojca Puncer

Faculty of Education, University of Maribor
Slovenia

Mojca Puncer received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maribor. She teaches at the Faculty of Education, at the Faculty of Arts in Maribor and at the Faculty of Design in Ljubljana. She is a co-founder of the Institute for New Media Art and Electronic Literature. Mojca works also as an independent curator (e.g. she participated in the international curatorial group of the collaborative art project BLOKI, 2013–15), critic and theoretician in the field of contemporary art, as a cultural educator and as a publicist. She is a member of the Slovenian Society of Aesthetics and the International Association of Aesthetics and is on the editorial board of fine art magazine Artwords. She has been published in numerous publications in Slovenia and abroad. She is the author of the books Contemporary Art and Aesthetics (2010) and Interspaces of Art (2018).

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i19.313 DOI: https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i19.313