Aesthetic, Anti-aesthetics, Anaesthetics: Art Through the Senses

About

The course is organised around the traditional division of the senses into sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. It begins by examining the ways in which senses have been hierarchised and divided within the Western philosophical tradition, touching on Aristotle, Kant and others and set in relation to critical approaches.
All thinking will be related to art inputs. The objective is to understand the relationship between aesthetics, as a perceptual element, and aesthetics as a value-drenched field, and how these aspects shift historically and socially. It aims also to draw into the debate the question of an aesthetics, as a figure for alienation, and the anti-aesthetic as an immanent critique.
It will draw on capacities for art analysis, conceptualisation of art, visual and aural analysis.
Also through this reflection on Sixth sense, with explorations of Ectoplasm, spirit Photography, Ether, aesthetics, anti-aesthetics, with art inputs from Susan Hiller, Suzanne Treister, Jane and Louise Wilson.

Course leader

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck. Her interests lie in the poetics of science and the politics of technologies. Her current work focuses on turbid media and the aesthetics of turbulence.

Target group

Summer School as School is an interdisciplinary education and art collaboration model designed for BA, MA and PhD students, artists, architects and researchers of visual arts, humanities and social sciences, political theory, art history and curatorial studies, architecture and design, and anyone with a keen interest in the subject area.

Course aim

The aims of the course are:
Broad exposure to artworks and critique from the Western tradition;
Interdisciplinary exploration of a diverse body of practices in relation to focused themes of the senses;
Interrelating of art and social meaning, aesthetics and politics.

Fee info