Aesthetic Description as Performative Act On Re-Figuring Spatial Loss

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Δημοσιευμένα: Ιαν 25, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/ps2023.7992
Thomas Symeonidis
Athens School of Fine Arts
Περίληψη

The aim of my paper will be to present some critical considerations regarding the relations between the notion of aesthetic description and what is known as performative act. By establishing a relation between the two, in terms of an analogy between the aesthetic and the performative, I will elaborate an argument regarding the aesthetic and performative properties of the body as an artwork and more broadly as a historical and material configuration. Understanding the aesthetic and the performative entails a certain refutation of conventional modes of causality along with the specification of an aesthetic domain of experience and the difference between causality and finality. My basic point is that what I call aesthetic description can be seen as a performative act. For the sake of my analysis, I will address a phenomenological idea of the body based on Judith Butler’s relevant contributions. For the larger part of my analysis, and under the aim to set an appropriate framework for unfolding my argument, I will rely on the way Jacques Rancière approaches two cases of aesthetic description. First, Winckelmann’s description of a statue known as the Belvedere Torso in his History of ancient art. Second, Schiller’s respective approach of a statue known as Juno Ludovisi in the 15th letter of his Letters for the aesthetic education of humanity. In both cases, there is the working of an aesthetic freedom exercised by the aesthetic categories of free play and appearance. In fact, these two categories are foundational for what Rancière calls the aesthetic regime of the arts in an attempt to capture the artistic and aesthetic phenomena that do not obey an imposed, in historical and cultural terms, harmony between poiesis and aisthesis. The overall aim of my approach will be to draw the basic lines of a method that entails the use of description as a performative-spatial tool that can in turn engage, in aesthetic and creative terms, with processes of reparation, reconstruction and re-design of impartial and ruined spaces.

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Αναφορές
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