Actual Virtual Journal's video: Clive Cazeaux - Sensation as Participation in Visual Art

A/V .04 2013 Autumn http://www.actualvirtualjournal.com/2014/11/av17.html Can an understanding be formed of how sensory experience might be arranged, presented or manipulated in visual art in order to promote a relational concept of the senses, in opposition to the customary, (and arguably) capitalist notion of sensation as a private possession, as a sensory impression that is mine? I ask the question in the light of recent visual art theory and practice which pursue relational, ecological ambitions. As theories and artworks, they claim to challenge the subject–object or artist–audience division by arguing that works of visual art have the capacity either to affect or to cultivate social, environmental or exchange-based states of being. Key thinkers in this area are Berleant, Bourriaud, Kester and Rancière. As they see it, ecological ambition and artistic form should correspond. But an ontological position is overlooked. Following Marx, our being is already relational in virtue of the fact that sensation is something in which we participate. In reasoning that ambition and form must correspond, Berleant, Bourriaud and Kester fail to recognize sensation as a site where the ecological cause can be fought. And Rancière’s distribution of the sensible does not address the particularity of sensory experience. I set out the difference between ontological approaches within recent relational or ecological aesthetics and my focus on sensibility, and identify some of the problems involved in referring to the senses. I spend the greater part of the paper articulating concepts that I think are central to the making and viewing of art where the ambition is to cultivate relational sensibility. These are concepts of style, autofiguration, and the mobility of sensory meaning, extrapolated from Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Cézanne. Underlying all three is an argument for positioning the senses ontologically as movements along lines of conceptual-sensory connection and implication, based on the transfer of meanings created artistically through style and autofiguration. Clive Cazeaux is Professor of Aesthetics at Cardiff School of Art and Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University.