As an increasing number of artists site their practice within the social fabric of everyday life, the ‘encounter’ has been placed at the heart of a newly defined aesthetic experience. Participatory, relational, collaborative and biopolitical methodologies now proliferate both within and beyond the white walls of the art institution while documentary modes, deployed by artists or curators, often play a pivotal role in mediating the scenarios produced. These moves into the terrains of lived experience are concomitant with what Nikos Papastergiadis has identified as the first truly global movement in art, which, precipitated as the economies of cultural circulation replicate the globalised movement of capital and labour, responds to incessant demands for communication, information and knowledge production (Papastergiadis 2011, 276). If, then, art’s latest re-emergence as a social practice demands hyper-local face-to-face encounters, it also remains enmeshed within, and constituted through, broader socio-economic realities. While this volume proposes that these transformations have been underpinned by the emergence of an economic subject, there are of course other decisive features which attend – not least art’s apparent endowment with a renewed and expanded ethical significance. Here I intend to look at how indeed the ‘encounter’ is constituted: what actually finds its way into contemporary art’s address to real life? And, why is this address persistently theorised in terms of ethics? What does the invocation of ethics bring into, or conversely occlude from, view?
Being With, Across, Over and Through: Art’s Caring Subjects, Ethics Debates and Encounters
In Economy: Art, Production and the Subject in the Twenty-First Century
edited by Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd
Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2015
140–57