Art and the Affect

International Journal of Art & Design Education, 2011

Affect often arises unexpectedly within the process of making art (along with other creative activities). In this article I argue for affect as a necessary and constructive dynamic within educational processes specifically for art and design. After a consideration of its recent neglect within art education, I revisit the notion of affect with reference to a number of thinkers who provide different perspectives, but particularly through the lens of the US psychologist Silvan Tomkins. Through him and others I seek to understand how affect can be recognised and cultivated in pedagogic situations. I do so by reflecting on the making and teaching experiences of students following an MA in Art and Design in Education and a practice-based PhD, as witnessed by me (supervisor/co-tutor), as recounted by students and as discussed in post event conversation/semistructured interviews.

Routledge, 2020

Why do painters paint? Obviously, there are numerous possible reasons. They paint to create images for others' enjoyment, to solve visual problems, to convey ideas, and to contribute to a rich artistic tradition. This book argues that there is yet another, crucially important but often overlooked reason.

Athenea Digital. Revista de pensamiento e investigación social

This paper maps the intersection of affect theory with literature and art through the revision of the question of representation. I argue that affect theory reinvigorates the problematic of representation by turning it into a debate about mediation, producing two main critical gestures when in contact with literary and artworks. On the one hand, scholarship has stayed "between representation" by taking affect as excessive of cognitive processes in order to analyze and expand how affect influences our representations of these processes, both when doing literary and art criticism, and when elaborating epistemological paradigms. On the other, theory has also stepped "beyond representation" by looking at affect as an autonomous entity in mediation whose capacities affect and surpass human cognition. In treating affect as a new capacious entity, critical concerns revolve around ontological questions, and they prioritize what affect is and does to bodies more than what it means.

2011

This book has three interconnected aims: to challenge the dominant characterisation of the art of the 1960s and 1970s as anti-aesthetic and affectless, to introduce feeling to the analysis of late modern and contemporary art, and to thereby properly acknowledge the specific contribution of leading women artists to this period. The book focuses on four well-known and highly respected North and South American artists of the period: Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark, Ana Mendieta and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. I show how their work transforms the avant-garde protocols of the period by introducing an affective dimension to late modern art. This aspect of their work, while frequently noted, has never been analysed in detail. "Visualizing Feeling" also addresses a methodological blind spot in art history: the interpretation of feeling, emotion and affect. It demonstrates that the affective dimension, alongside other materials and methods of art, is part of the artistic means of production and innovation. This is the first thorough re-appraisal of aesthetic engagement with affect in post-1960s art. CONTENTS Introduction 1 Minimalism and Subjectivity: Aesthetics and the Anti-Aesthetic Tradition 2 Feeling and Late Modern Art 3 Participation, Affect and the Body: Lygia Clark 4 Eva Hesse’s Late Sculptures: Elusive Expression and Unconscious Affect 5 Ana Mendieta: Affect Miniaturization, Emotional Ties and the Silueta Series 6 The Dream of the Audience: The Moving Images of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Conclusion: Which anthropomorphism? Book endorsements: "At last, here is, a book that lifts the ban on affect imposed on art criticism and theory by the "anti-aesthetic" school that has been dominating the scene in the last forty years! Taking her clues from four of the best women artists whose work spans the period, Susan Best convincingly demonstrates that if you close the door of the house of art to feelings, they enter through the window. What’s more, this is valid for the supposedly ‘anaesthetic’ art movements - minimal and conceptual art - that form the contextual background of her case studies: they are no less aesthetic than the art of the past or the most recent present." -- Thierry de Duve, Historian and Theorist of contemporary art and Professor at University of Lille "Susan Best's remarkably lucid and paradoxical project begins the process of recovering feeling and emotion in late modern art. Her landmark study of four women artists - Hesse, Clark, Mendieta and Cha - rescues both the feminine and the aesthetic from the ghetto, by an astute combination of psycho-analysis and art history." -- Dr. Ann Stephen, Senior Curator, Sydney University Museums "Visualizing Feeling develops a compelling argument for focusing on precisely the centrality of affect and feeling in any understanding of the art of the 1960s and 1970s, where it seemed that affect no longer had a place. In exploring the work of four powerful and sometimes neglected women artists, she shows how it is paradoxically where affect is consciously minimized that it nevertheless returns to haunt the art work as its most powerful force. Art works affect before they inform, perform or communicate. Sue Best demonstrates that by restoring the question of affect and emotion to the art work, new kinds of questions can be asked about the feminine in art, questions that affirm the personal and political power of these works of art." -- Elizabeth Grosz, Rutgers University, author of Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, Columbia University Press, 2008 Reviews: Choice, Feb (2012), Art & Australia, 49.4 (2012), Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 12 (2012), Cassone, Feb (2013), Parallax (2013).

2021

Most Art Therapists and Art Psychotherapists have a belief in the healing qualities of the media. It is a shared article of faith that creative material processes, of themselves, can promote the development of health and stability. Nevertheless, we also know that the relation to the material element is not without hazard. This is a problem for us, I think, because we can never be certain about the relationship between a service user, or client, and the physical material she manipulates. In terms of the relation that the other has to substance and process, we are always on the outside. This book by Jussi A. Saarinen, who is a psychologist and a post-doctoral researcher in philosophy, explores the painter's relationship to painting, the 'experience itself' (2021: 1. italics the author). Saarinen stresses that he is not concerned with expression but with what painters feel 'because they paint' (2021:1). His book is essentially a carefully constructed argument, which...

Philosophia, 2021

The final official version is here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11406-020-00252-z Abstract In the past 60 years or so, the philosophical subject of artistic expression has generally been handled as an inquiry into the artistic expression of emotion. In my view this has led to a distortion of the relevant territory, to the artistic expression of feeling’s too often being overlooked. I explicate the emotion-feeling distinction in modern terms (distinguishing mood as well), and urge that the expression of feeling is too central to be waived off as outside the proper philosophical subject of artistic expression. Restricting the discussion to the art of painting (and drawing), I sketch a partial psychological model for the exrtistic expression of feelipression of feeling. Although the feeling-emotion contrast is seldom made clear in their writings, I stress that many, or even most of the eminent pre-1960’s voices in aesthetics and art criticism—Croce, Dewey, Langer, Bosanquet, Berenson and others—would more or less agree that feeling is no less important for expression than emotion, and indeed can be interpreted as anticipating many points that I set forth.

Aesthetics and Affectivity, ed. by Laura La Bella, Stefano Marino and Vittoria Sisca, issue n. 60/1 of "The Polish Journal of Aesthetics" (2021), 2021

Feelings, emotions, phenomena of empathy and sympathy, appetites, desires, moods, and generally the whole sphere of affectivity make up one of the most fundamental dimensions of human life which, also with the advent of the so-called “Affective Turn” in various fields of the human and social sciences, has been the object of recent rediscovery and revaluation. Sometimes this renewed appreciation of the affective and emotional dimension of experience in contemporary thought has also been put in contrast with a certain primacy of the purely representational and cognitive dimension that has been quite characteristic of modern thinking and culture. As has been noted about the notion of atmosphere (Griffero 2018), “the humanities […], bypassing positivist conventions and endorsing more […] affective paradigms rather than […] cognitive ones,” in the last decades have been focused “more on the vague and expressive qualia of reality (the how) than on its defined and quantified materiality (the what)”: mutatis mutandis, a consideration of this kind can probably be applied also to the revaluation and rehabilitation of the sphere of affectivity in general. If what has been said above is true with regard to our experience of the world in general, it is probably even more accurate and more evident in the specific case of our experience with art and the aesthetic. In fact, the abovementioned fundamental elements or components of the human experience of the world as such, i.e., of the human experience understood at the most general level, also seem to play an essential role (although in different and sometimes problematic ways) in art and aesthetic experience. Of course, this has been widely (although variously and hence not always systematically and coherently) recognized since the beginning of Western philosophy and culture and in non-Western forms of thinking and worldviews. Focusing our attention again on the present age, we may notice that this has led in our time, among other things, to significant developments in several fields and subfields of contemporary aesthetics variously interested in the role played by the dimension of affectivity in human experience; including—for example, and without any presumption or claim for completeness—recent aesthetic conceptions connected to theories of embodiment and the extended mind (Noë 2015; Matteucci 2019), phenomenological aesthetics of atmospheres and emotional spaces (Griffero 2016), and also somaesthetics with a significant revaluation of the bodily dimension in its entirety (Shusterman 1999, 2019). As noted by Richard Shusterman about his original disciplinary proposal (namely somaesthetics), its roots in the original project of aesthetics as not only a theory of fine art and natural beauty but also (if not mainly) as a theory of sensory perception and its status of a discipline of both theory and practice: “the senses surely belong to the body and are deeply influenced by its condition. Our sensory perception thus depends on how the body feels and functions; what it desires, does, and suffers. […] Concerned not simply with the body’s external form or representation but also with its lived experience, somaesthetics works at improving awareness of our bodily states and feelings, thus providing greater insight into both our passing moods and lasting attitudes” (Shusterman 1999, 301-302). As guest editors of “Aesthetics and Affectivity,” vol. 60/1 (2021) of The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, we are now happy to present to our readers a volume that, as the Table of Contents clearly shows, includes seven contributions offered by several scholars of aesthetics. As readers will immediately see by simply reading the titles of the essays collected here, and then understand better by carefully reading the full papers, these contributions are all strictly focused on the question concerning the affective dimension(s) of human experience as explained before. Nevertheless, at the same time, they are all different from each other as far as the cultural backgrounds, the theoretical interests, the chosen methodologies, the particular topics studied, and the specific aims of the various authors are concerned.

Public, 2009

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2019

We humans continuously reshape the environment to alter, enhance, and sustain our affective lives. This two-way modification has been discussed in recent philosophy of mind as affective scaffolding, wherein scaffolding quite literally means that our affective states are enabled and supported by environmental resources such as material objects, other people, and physical spaces. In this article, I will argue that under certain conditions paintings function as noteworthy affective scaffolds to their creators. To expound this idea, I will begin with a theoretical overview of affective niche construction and affective scaffolding. Then, based on the criteria of robustness, concreteness, and dependability, I will specify a solid type of affective scaffolding and propound paintings as a cogent case of such. In support of my argument, I will highlight two feelings typical to painterly creativity: the feeling of aesthetic resonance and the feeling of fusion. To conclude, I will discuss the overall contributions and limitations of my account.

In this essay, we provide an account of the basic emotions and their expression. On our view, emotions are experiences that indicate and have the function of indicating how our body is faring and how we are faring in our environment. Emotions are also objects of experience: our perceptual systems are more or less sensitive to the expression of emotion in our environment by features that indicate and have the function of indicating emotions. We apply our account to expression in art. What does it mean to say that an artwork expresses sadness? Is perceiving joy in an artwork the same kind of experience as perceiving joy in a friend’s face? How may artworks express emotions without having emotions or any other mental states? In the next section, we provide an overview of unrestricted representationalism about experience. In section three, we offer a representationalist account of the basic emotions that combines exteroception and interoception. On our view, emotions are perceptual experiences that represent properties of our viscera and properties in our extra-bodily environment. Exteroceptive and interoceptive systems combine to constitute a system whose states—emotions—indicate and have the function of indicating how our body is faring and how we are faring in our environment. In the fourth section, we survey aesthetic theories of expression in art including the resemblance, persona and arousal theories, and argue that each faces significant problems. Building on the work of Dominic Lopes (2005) and Mitchell Green (2007), we offer a teleosemantic account of emotional expression in art that is impersonal and continuous with a representationalist account of the basic emotions. Finally, in section five, we apply our view to an example—Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa—in order to illustrate how we experience emotions as represented properties of a painted canvas.