Centralizing the Periphery: Social Art, Eco-aesthetics and Liminal Space
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Roberdeau, Wood. 2013. 'Centralizing the Periphery: Social Art, Eco-aesthetics and Liminal Space'. In: Ordinary/Everyday/Quotidian. University of York, United Kingdom 26 - 27 September 2013. [Conference or Workshop Item]
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‘Unmediated and endured by those who live it, the everyday acts as mediator between nature and culture. The false light which bathes it grows dim and is outshone by the true clarity of critique. At the same time, its apparent solidity bursts asunder to reveal it as the point where nature and culture come together. Culture, which perpetuates this situation, is dismantled theoretically, and nature regains its strength, but far away from man and the human, which now must be redefined.’
The nature/culture dichotomy described here by Henri Lefebvre continues to resonate in the twenty-first century. If, as suggested by Ben Highmore, concepts of the everyday must be expanded beyond codifying restrictions such as material specificity and national exceptionalism, then perhaps such an expansion can be discovered through the intermingling of not only academic disciplines (e.g. art history and ecology) but also the exacting space-time compressions in which certain visual works define and challenge otherwise distinct categories of meaning. An aesthetics of everyday life, in the aftermath of humanist limitations, has begun to merge with current developments in critical theory. Thanks a widening of thematics (e.g. the ‘political’ and the ‘natural’) by selected contemporary art practices, one might chart an attempt to move away from (but not to discount) the well-trodden terrain of commodity consumerism within late capitalism. This paper turns to examples of such works in order to explore any interstitiality in Lefebvre’s assertions and to ask whether a model of the quotidian could be extended to a notion of the post-human once that grey zone is discovered. A main approach will be to focus on forgotten spaces and unfamiliar customs, thereby shedding a new light on the ordinariness of the real. Possible case studies are the architectural and communal experiments of Atelier Van Lieshout, the ‘material manifestations’ of everyday experiences that inform the work of Andrea Zittel, and T.A.M.A. (Temporary Autonomous Museum for All) that, for the 2009 Lyon Biennale (The Spectacle of the Everyday), collaborated with the non-national and nomadic Romani people of Eastern Europe to establish ephemeral micro-communities, effectively blurring the boundary between cultural anthropology and curatorial knowledge.
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Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
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University of York, United Kingdom |
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| Date range: |
26 - 27 September 2013 |
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| Item ID: |
35620 |
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| Date Deposited: |
15 Mar 2024 15:38 |
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| Last Modified: |
15 Mar 2024 15:38 |
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