Somaesthetics and democracy: Dewey and contemporary body art

Journal of Aesthetic Education

Volumn 36, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 55-69

  Jay, Martin ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149136300     PISSN: 00218510     EISSN: 15437809     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3301568     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn, 1934), 56.
2. Thomas Alexander, "The Art of Life: Dewey's Aesthetics," in Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 4.
3. Dewey cited in Hickman, Reading Dewey, 349.
4. Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 401-2.
5. David Fott, John Dewey: America's Philosopher of Democracy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 109.
6. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-garde, trans. Michael Snow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
7. Dewey, Art as Experience, 227.
8. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1959).
9. See, for example, Philip W. Jackson, John Dewey and the Lessons of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
10. Perhaps the best general study remains Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey's Theory of Art, Experience and Nature (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987).
11. Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1997), 177.
12. See also Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992);
13. and Richard Shusterman, Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
14. Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, 21.
15. Dewey wrote the introduction to three of Alexander's books, Man's Supreme Inheritance (1918), Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual (1923)
16. and The Use of the Self (1932). He credited the "Alexander Technique" for having relieved his own problems of bad posture and stiffness, even his poor eyesight. Shusterman is himself a practitioner of Feldenkrais therapy, which continues this tradition.
17. Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy, 176.
18. For Rorty's rebuttal, see "Response to Richard Shusterman," in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Matthew Festeinstein and Simon Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).
19. In a recent interview, "Self-Styling after the 'End of Art,'" conducted by Chantal Ponbrian and Olivier Asselin in Parachute, 105 (2002): 59, Shusterman does mention in passing several of the body artists discussed below. But he understands them as examples of "self-fashioning" and bodily discipline, rather than as challenges to normative notions of the self as active agent and the body as a fashioned aesthetic whole.
20. Tracy Warr and Amelia Jones, The Artist's Body (London: Phaidon, 2000).
21. There have, to be sure, been earlier accounts, for example, RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (London: Abrams, 1988);
22. Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998);
23. and Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, eds., Performing the Body/ Performing the Text (London: Routledge, 1999).
24. Dewey's friendship with the collector Albert Barnes, who was a resolutely anti-contextualist formalist, seems to have influenced his own judgments about the importance of form. For a discussion of Barnes and Dewey, which treats this issue at some length, see Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 252-65.
25. Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," (1967) in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
26. In fact, this essay became an inevitable target in many accounts of the genesis of body art, for example see the following articles, all found in Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject: Jones, "Art History/Art Criticism: Performing Meaning," 42-46;
27. Christine Poggi, "Following Acconci/Targeting Vision," 269;
28. and Joanna Lowry, "Performing Vision in the Theatre of the Gaze: The Work of Douglas Gordon," 276.
29. Warr and Jones, The Artist's Body, 60.
30. For an analysis see Philip Ursprung, "'Catholic Tastes': Hurting and Healing the Body in Viennese Actionism in the 1960s," in Jones and Stephenson, Performing the Body/Performing the Text.
31. Warr and Jones, The Artist's Body, 93, here describe the eightieth of these in the 1984 series.
32. Martin Jay, "Abjection Overruled," Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).
33. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
34. Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace; A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).
35. For similar analyses, see Murray Krieger, Arts on the Level: The Fall of the Elite Object (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981)
36. and George J. Leonard, Into the Light of Things: The Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
37. Perhaps one exception is the recent self-marketing of Orlan, who has decided her art is not "body art" but rather "l'art charnel." See her website http://www.cicv.fr/creation-artistique/cynline/ orlan/review4/revue4.html.
38. Ursprung, "'Catholic Tastes,'" 150.
39. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
40. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 448.
41. Fott, John Dewey, 118.