ASA Sponsors Session at the 2022 College Art Association (Virtual)

The American Society for Aesthetics is pleased to announce that it is sponsoring a panel at the annual meeting of the College Art Association in Chicago February 16-19, 2022. The Panel, organized by Sue Spaid and Rossen Ventzislavov, will be held Friday, February 18 from 10:00 – 11:30 am. At this writing, the meeting will be virtual.

For registration information, click here.

Panel Title: Recent Perspectives in the Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Panel Participants: Eleen Deprez, Jean-Paul Martinon and Sue Spaid

Panel Abstract: In 2020, three philosophers, who also have curatorial experience, published philosophy books and a dissertation focused on curating. This panel aims to clarify these philosophers’ different insights, as well as to demonstrate the variety of philosophical approaches available to curators and artists alike. Deprez and Martinon address the curator’s role, while Spaid focuses on the spectators’ role.

Discussant: Rossen Ventzislavov (rossen_ventzislavov@yahoo.com ), Professor of Philosophy at Woodbury University, has written on curating, architecture, literature and theater. His work has appeared in Deleuze Studies, Contemporary Aesthetics, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, X-tra, Tripwire, Public Seminar, and Debates in Aesthetics. He has been a member of the Encounter art collective in Los Angeles for the last seven years and is currently working on a monograph on performance art.

Eleen Deprez

Abstract for “Restage, Rebuild, Repeat: An Ontology of Curated Exhibitions”

An exhibition can move or change locations while remaining the same exhibition. Sometimes, a reinstallation will use exactly the same artworks, reuse plinths, reproduce the wall labels, and try – within the scope of the new space – to rehang the works in the same way. Often however, a reinstallation will look very different from the original exhibition. For example, because of conservation constraints, lending issues, or practical restrictions, an exhibition’s restaged version lacks the original version’s artworks. We intuit that such changes are acceptable, and that restaged exhibitions - even with certain works omitted - are instances of the same curatorial work. But there do seem to be limits. How much can an exhibition change when it is being reinstalled? Are some features more significant or consequential than others with respect to the identity of a curated exhibition? Motivated by these and other examples, I will argue that a curated exhibition is an ontological hybrid: a concrete site-responsive display of artworks and an abstract curatorial utterance made through that display. I argue that two curated exhibitions are identical if their authored-curatorial utterances have the same illocutionary force and their displays support that utterance through a similar appreciative context. Thus, (i) two exhibitions that look exactly the same but do not make the same utterance are not identical and (ii) that two exhibitions that have the same illocution but achieve this by creating different appreciative contexts (i.e. displaying different works or thematizing different features in the works) are not identical.

Bio: Eleen M. Deprez is a visiting tutor at the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford and an Honorary Researcher at the University of Kent. She is a philosopher of art and a curator.

Jean-Paul Martinon

Abstract for “Curating Philosophy or Intuitive Science”

If curating is an indeterminable activity with diverse disciplinary heritages and sporadic scholarly import, then philosophy must stay well clear of it. It must not meddle with curating’s endeavors. Inversely, if philosophy is a heavy and abstract undertaking with long-standing lineages of thought, then curating should stay well clear of it. It must not weigh itself down with unnecessary argumentations or speculations. At the heart of such a distinction is Plato’s famous condemnation of the arts as being an oblique, unscientific, and opinion-led form of knowledge and his elevation of philosophy as the only science worthy of its name because it is essentially precise and rigorous. Can there be a way of conceiving these two practices together in such a way that it fosters a type of intuitive knowledge, such as that put forward by Spinoza? In this paper, I will attempt to show that intuitive reasoning is paramount to curating and that philosophy cannot do without it, especially if it refuses the shelters provided by ivory towers of knowledge. Through a reading of Spinoza, I will argue that the two practices can come together as both an intellectual and sensory act of knowledge. Alongside Spinoza, this paper will also touch upon the work of authors such as Sarah Kofman and Gilles Deleuze.

Bio: Jean-Paul Martinon is Reader in Visual Cultures and Philosophy at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has written monographs on a Victorian workhouse (Swelling Grounds, Rear Window, 1995), the idea of the future in the work of Derrida, Malabou and Nancy (On Futurity, Palgrave, 2007), the temporal dimension of masculinity (The End of Man, Punctum, 2013), and the concept of peace after the Rwandan genocide (After “Rwanda,” Rodopi, 2013). He is also the editor of The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating (Bloomsbury, 2014). His latest book, Curating as Ethics was published in 2020 by Minnesota University Press. www.jeanpaulmartinon.net

Sue Spaid

Abstract for “The Spectators’ Special Role”

Building on Marcel Duchamp’s notion that ‘the spectator completes the work of art’, this paper credits spectators with becoming the stakeholders who weave the narratives that lend artworks their meanings over time, a view that philosophers typically attribute to the artist and/or curator prior to the exhibition. In treating artworks as ongoing events whose presentational histories begin with their first public appearance, this paper characterizes artworks as dynamic objects, hardly bound to particular eras. In contrast to the view that individuals read artworks like texts, I cast the entire process as collective, the activity of myriad people working in various contexts and over time. To tease out this view, I articulate the relationship between exhibitions, spectators and future presentations, such that artworks are more profound than mere treasures, since they inspire spectators’ imaginations over centuries.

Bio: The author of five books on art and ecology, Spaid has curated hundreds of exhibitions, including ‘biennials’ such as the 2001 Pacific Northwest Annual at the Bellevue Art Museum and the 2006 Mississippi Invitational at the Mississippi Museum of Art. Her exhibitions have been supported by an Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation Award, Mondriaan Fonds, BankGiro Loterij Fonds and NEA Access to Artistic Excellence. In 2018, The Nick Reeves Award for Arts and Environment cited “Ecovention Europe” “ Special Commendation.” Prior to earning a Ph. D. in Philosophy at Temple University in 2013, Spaid worked as a commercial gallerist in Los Angeles, a museum curator in Cincinnati, a sculpture park curator in Philadelphia and a museum director in Baltimore. She regularly presents papers at the American Society for Aesthetics, the European Society for Aesthetics, and the Nordic Society for Aesthetics. An Associate Editor of Aesthetic Investigations, her papers have appeared in Rivista di Estetica , Journal of Somaesthetics, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Popular Inquiry, Art Inquiry: Recherche sur les art, and Philosophica. The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice: Between Work and World is her first philosophical monograph.