Beyond Objecthood

Beyond Objecthood
Author: James Voorhies
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2017-02-24
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262035529

The rise of the exhibition as critical form and artistic medium, from Robert Smithson's antimodernist non-sites in 1968 to today's institutional gravitation toward the participatory. In 1968, Robert Smithson reacted to Michael Fried's influential essay “Art and Objecthood” with a series of works called non-sites. While Fried described the spectator's connection with a work of art as a momentary visual engagement, Smithson's non-sites asked spectators to do something more: to take time looking, walking, seeing, reading, and thinking about the combination of objects, images, and texts installed in a gallery. In Beyond Objecthood, James Voorhies traces a genealogy of spectatorship through the rise of the exhibition as a critical form—and artistic medium. Artists like Smithson, Group Material, and Michael Asher sought to reconfigure and expand the exhibition and the museum into something more active, open, and democratic, by inviting spectators into new and unexpected encounters with works of art and institutions. This practice was sharply critical of the ingrained characteristics long associated with art institutions and conventional exhibition-making; and yet, Voorhies finds, over time the critique has been diluted by efforts of the very institutions that now gravitate to the “participatory.” Beyond Objecthood focuses on innovative figures, artworks, and institutions that pioneered the exhibition as a critical form, tracing its evolution through the activities of curator Harald Szeemann, relational art, and New Institutionalism. Voorhies examines recent artistic and curatorial work by Liam Gillick, Thomas Hirschhorn, Carsten Höller, Maria Lind, Apolonija Šušteršič, and others, at such institutions as Documenta, e-flux, Manifesta, and Office for Contemporary Art Norway, and he considers the continued potential of the exhibition as a critical form in a time when the differences between art and entertainment increasingly blur.

The Move Beyond Form

The Move Beyond Form
Author: M. Hughes
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2013-03-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 113732922X

Fictional narratives of the late twentieth century often cross boundaries. This study argues that the undoing of structure in postmodern art form demands a different way of thinking and represents a commentary on the material and social conditions of the late twentieth century and beyond.

Beyond Reduction

Beyond Reduction
Author: Steven Horst
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2007-08-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190295589

Contemporary philosophers of mind tend to assume that the world of nature can be reduced to basic physics. Yet there are features of the mind consciousness, intentionality, normativity that do not seem to be reducible to physics or neuroscience. This explanatory gap between mind and brain has thus been a major cause of concern in recent philosophy of mind. Reductionists hold that, despite all appearances, the mind can be reduced to the brain. Eliminativists hold that it cannot, and that this implies that there is something illegitimate about the mentalistic vocabulary. Dualists hold that the mental is irreducible, and that this implies either a substance or a property dualism. Mysterian non-reductive physicalists hold that the mind is uniquely irreducible, perhaps due to some limitation of our self-understanding. In this book, Steven Horst argues that this whole conversation is based on assumptions left over from an outdated philosophy of science. While reductionism was part of the philosophical orthodoxy fifty years ago, it has been decisively rejected by philosophers of science over the past thirty years, and for good reason. True reductions are in fact exceedingly rare in the sciences, and the conviction that they were there to be found was an artifact of armchair assumptions of 17th century Rationalists and 20th century Logical Empiricists. The explanatory gaps between mind and brain are far from unique. In fact, in the sciences it is gaps all the way down.And if reductions are rare in even the physical sciences, there is little reason to expect them in the case of psychology. Horst argues that this calls for a complete re-thinking of the contemporary problematic in philosophy of mind. Reductionism, dualism, eliminativism and non-reductive materialism are each severely compromised by post-reductionist philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind is in need of a new paradigm. Horst suggests that such a paradigm might be found in Cognitive Pluralism: the view that human cognitive architecture constrains us to understand the world through a plurality of partial, idealized, and pragmatically-constrained models, each employing a particular representational system optimized for its own problem domain. Such an architecture can explain the disunities of knowledge, and is plausible on evolutionary grounds.

The System of Absentology in Ontological Philosophy

The System of Absentology in Ontological Philosophy
Author: Adam Lovasz
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2016-09-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1443816558

This volume deals primarily with absentology, an ontological and social-scientific epistemological mode, dedicated to the analysis of absence. The book is drawn by manifestations of absence wherever they may be encountered. It deals with three terms, ‘the shadow economy’, ‘corruption’ and ‘pollution’, while constructing a non-realist ontology predicated upon the emptiness of all predicates, as expounded by certain strands of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. According to the absentological viewpoint, there is nothing outside, beyond, below or above relations. Relations exist on their own, enchained within an immense, infinite regress, opening and closing upon one another. Absentology is, by consequence of its nonattachment to phenomena, a form of social inquiry fundamentally alien to each and every social form, and it abandons any illusions about the possibility of an escape from the realm of relationality. This book will appeal to students and academics interested in ontological philosophy.

Science, Objectivity, and Consciousness

Science, Objectivity, and Consciousness
Author: Emilios Bouratinos
Publisher: ICRL Press
Total Pages: 326
Release:
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1936033305

This thought-provoking work offers a profound scholarly examination of how the process of objectification has come to limit our scientific and philosophical views of reality. The author proposes a new self-reflective interdisciplinary science of consciousness, one that recognizes subjective experience as a vital component of the activity of consciousness. By creating a bridge over the subject-object divide, Emilios Bouratinos hopes to open a door to a new kind of science, leading to both the betterment of research in many fields and the long-term assurance of human survival.

Photovoice Research in Education and Beyond

Photovoice Research in Education and Beyond
Author: Amanda O. Latz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2017-04-07
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1317529898

Photovoice is a form of participatory action research, which has been gaining use and momentum since its inception in the mid-1990s. Within the enactment of this methodology, research participants are invited to document aspects of their lives through photography and then provide written or oral accounts of the images they create. Designed to situate participants as experts on their lives and their experiences, photovoice is a powerful and visceral approach to policy change efforts. In this book, the photovoice methodology is conceptualized as being comprised of eight steps: identification, invitation, education, documentation, narration, ideation, presentation, and confirmation. Each of the steps is explained and expanded upon, and insights are drawn from the extant photovoice literature and the author’s personal experience. In addition, attention is given to the history of photography and inquiry, theoretical underpinnings and aims of the methodology, ethical considerations, methods and procedures, approaches to data analysis, and photovoice exhibitions. Finally, the author has attended to some aspects of photovoice that have historically been left unattended, such as: building a conceptual framework for a photovoice study, viewing the photovoice exhibition as a site of inquiry, and thinking through the ways in which ever-evolving photography technologies can and should impact decision-making throughout the photovoice process. While many texts exist that touch on and/or address photovoice, this is the first book solely dedicated to the entirety of the photovoice methodology — from theory to exhibition. Built as a practical guide, readers will find a wealth of information, resources, and advice within this book. Educators, students, and academic researchers will find this an accessible and compassionate text, one that will be a trusted companion while on the photovoice project journey.

Beyond Vision

Beyond Vision
Author: Casey O'Callaghan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2017-01-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191085839

Beyond Vision brings together eight essays by Casey O'Callaghan. The works draw theoretical and philosophical lessons about perception, the nature of its objects, and sensory awareness through sustained attention to extra-visual and multisensory forms of perception and perceptual consciousness. O'Callaghan focuses on auditory perception, perception of spoken language, and multisensory perception. The first essays concern the nature of audition's objects, focusing on sounds, especially drawing attention to the ways in which they contrast with vision's objects. The middle essays explore forms of auditory perception that could not be explained without understanding audition's interactions with other senses. This bridges work on sound perception with work on multisensory perception, and it raises multisensory perception as an important topic for understanding perception even in a single modality. The last essays are devoted to multisensory perception and perceptual consciousness. They argue that no complete account of perception overall or of multisensory perceptual consciousness can be developed in modality-specific terms-perceiving amounts to more than just seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling at the same time. The final essay presents a new framework for understanding what it is to be modality-specific or to be multisensory.

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond
Author: Philipp Schorch
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2020-03-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1787357481

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond provides a new look at the old anthropological concern with materiality and connectivity. It understands materiality not as defined property of some-thing, nor does it take connectivity as merely a relation between discrete entities. Somewhat akin to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it sees materiality and connectivity as two interrelated modes in which an entity is, or more precisely – is becoming, in the world. The question, thus, is how these two modes of becoming relate and fold into each other. Throughout the four-year research process that led to this book, the authors approached this question not just from a theoretical perspective; taking the suggestion of 'thinking through things' literally and methodologically seriously, the first two workshops were dedicated to practical, hands-on exercises working with things. From these workshops a series of installations emerged, straddling the boundaries of art and academia. These installations served as artistic-academic interventions during the final symposium and are featured alongside the other academic contributions to this volume. Throughout this process, two main themes emerged and structure Part II, Movement and Growth, and Part III, Dissolution and Traces, of the present volume, respectively. Part I, Conceptual Grounds, consists of two chapters offering conceptual takes on things and ties – one from anthropology and one from archaeology. As interrelated modes of becoming, materiality and connectivity make it necessary to coalesce things and ties into thing~ties – an insight toward which the chapters and interventions came from different sides, and one in which the initial proposition of the editors still shines through. Throughout the pages of this volume, we invite the reader to travel beyond imaginaries of a universe of separate planets united by connections, and to venture with us instead into the thicket of thing~ties in which we live.

Dative constructions in Romance and beyond

Dative constructions in Romance and beyond
Author: Anna Pineda
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2020
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 396110249X

This book offers a comprehensive account of dative structures across languages –with an important, though not exclusive, focus on the Romance family. As is well-known, datives play a central role in a variety of structures, ranging from ditransitive constructions to cliticization of indirect objects and differentially marked direct objects, and including also psychological predicates, possessor or causative constructions, among many others. As interest in all these topics has increased significantly over the past three decades, this volume provides an overdue update on the state of the art. Accordingly, the chapters in this volume account for both widely discussed patterns of dative constructions as well as those that are relatively unknown.

Postsensual Aesthetics

Postsensual Aesthetics
Author: James Voorhies
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2023-02-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262372843

Contemporary art exhibitions appeal to cognition as well as the senses, modeling a new and expansive understanding of global aesthetics. In this original work of aesthetic theory, James Voorhies argues that we live in the shadow of old ways of thinking about art that emphasize the immediate visual experience of an autonomous art object. But theory must change as artistic and curatorial production has changed. It should encompass the full range of activities through which we encounter art and exhibitions, in which reading and thinking are central to the aesthetic experience. Voorhies advances the theoretical framework of a “postsensual aesthetics,” which does not mean we are beyond a sensual engagement with objects, but rather embraces the cognitive connections with ideas that unite art and knowledge production. Cognitive engagements with art often begin with publications conceived as integral to exhibitions, conveying the knowledge and research artists and curators produce, and continuing in time and space beyond traditional curatorial frames. The idea, and not just visual immediacy, is now art’s defining moment. Voorhies reframes aesthetic criteria to account for the liminal, cognitive spaces inside and outside of the exhibition. Surveying a wide range of artists, curators, exhibitions, and related publications, he repositions the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno, and draws inspiration from Rosalind Krauss and Fredric Jameson, to describe a contemporary “logic of the curatorial.” He demonstrates how, even as we increasingly expect to learn from contemporary art, we must avoid an instrumentalist and reductive view of art as a mere source of information. As Voorhies shows through an analysis of two major global exhibitions, dOCUMENTA (13) (artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev) and Documenta11 (artistic director Okwui Enwezor), and of Ute Meta Bauer’s curatorial work at the Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, it is imperative for artistic research to retain its unique role in the production of knowledge.