CONTEXTUALISATION - LECTURE 1

Lecture 1- 18.09
INTRODUCTION: ART, MATTER, AFFECT

- what is feeling? what is sensation?
- what does it mean to put something in context?
- practice using the field terminology (social practice, etc...)
- who and what can partake in relation? who/what can affect?
- what does it mean  that something is social, who defines this.
-(check links to avant-garde of 20s in terms of literature)
- Susan sontag: in the 60s criticism and aesthetics neglected the senses of art. too much content, just feel and hear and see, experience art without the intellectual part almost, just what you feel.
-hermeneutics (Gadamer): analyze things, objects, arts as texts.
- 1960s= shift from modern art to contemporary art
- link between earth/land art + going back to ‘erotics’ of art instead of hermeneutics. check robert smithson writings (the new monument).
-Ana Mendiata, death of an artistr. earth bodyworks. memory in her body, in the site, in the elements, etc... interested in the emotional qualities of her material, not their ‘formal’ qualities/characteristics/properties of materials.
-art & language movements

-how can we think affect, touch, being touched, what is a body, where does a body stop and start, who is the subject and the object: how does materiality come in and how about space/place?
- relations evolving ‘in-between’ bodies, bodies & matter, this in-between is not neccessarily human (Seighworth+Gregg, 2010). Understanding affect through the in-between.
- Deleuze + Guattari: ‘affects are no longer feelings + affections, they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them’ . They (percepts, affects + sensations are beings whose validity lies in themselves + exceeds anything alive). They are valid because they say they are valid? or defined as valid. (?)
- the affect is a state, the affect is a passage from one state to another. not in the subject or object. the in-between. a state of becoming (link to Deleuze).
   - where does material start and finish? where does sensation start and finish? the preparation of painting is just as much part of the painting process, where does it start and stop?
- becoming makes both sides of the exchange between the individual + the environment. becoming = non-human becomings=that ‘in-between’ space.
- all waters of the earth are connected, through air, participation, inhabitants, etc... all that is connected to the water is what connects the waters.
- taking the environment as a start-up for decoloniztion through sensing = Carolina Caycedo ‘be damned’ film.
- what are some ways of sensing?

Seminar - 19.09
INTRODUCTION: ART, MATTER, AFFECT
- in relation to Susan Sontag: we need context too no? when it’s too much about and only about aesthetics, without the artist’s meaning.  Institutions want to make art available for everyone (in relation to the høstutstilling talk).
- real art (the art she’s writing about Susan Sontag) has the capacity to make us nervous (so emotional). p8
- can people who aren’t used to contemporary art get to their emotions and how they relate to the art without being judgemental? feeling like watching art is a waste of time if there’s no explanation. but at the same time, art that has ten million explanations is also judged.
- there’s no distinction between form + content
- the choice of form/medium speaks directly to our senses. mediation matters. see walter benjamin art in the age of mechanical reproduction. art works so closely to our senses.
- - agency is a matter of power, power structures.
- Sontag speaks of human senses, human emotions.
- new materalism: the whole thing about assemblage, going against boundaries, nature-culture, this is related to new materialism.
- assemblage= collage= as seen in dadaism previously
- social participation: who is that social? energies in-between? in-between what?
- Affects: becoming, affects are not static. think of what the participant said in relation to trees not being static beings.
- the affect is a transition, something happens, transition from one thing to another, this transition is an event (link to what U le Guin says about communication: box A to box B), the materials, our environment have an affect.  they are expressive but act as the transfer.
- form can also create affect (’form is forceful’), it has power and agency.
- who do you give agency to when you storytell
- build up your own thoughts, universe (atmospherically, figuratively, the form (feeling of being there), what else) in order to convey your artworks/art practices)
- relational æsthetics related to cooking, social gathering, etc... but they were mainly human. be aware of the more-than-human encoutners in your site as well.
- Deleuze: non-human becomings.
- the emotional (erotics from Sontag and Lorde) is still seen as a woman’s realm, not from ‘man’.