Digital Commons@RISD Home > Division of Liberal Arts > Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive) > Vol. 5 (2007)
Abstract
This essay explores the relations between perception, phenomenology and art practice. The object of my inquiry is the kind of perceptual repertoire available to the artist in relation to his art, which extends beyond the technical means available to art making in its varying forms. I invoke an artist's innate perception as the source and locus of art's creation. This creation of art also has an outward or phenomenological dimension. In this respect, I investigate the ways in which phenomenological perception, via Maurice Merleau-Ponty's hermeneutic insights into artistic activity, might offer to contemporary arts practice a means of reappraising its thoughts and actions. Here I propose the artist as one who embodies and uncovers artistic sensation: something which is embedded in an artist's working consciousness. In addition, I evaluate the ways in which Merleau-Ponty's perception into art might revivify an artist's laboring body in the formative conditions of artistic expression and how such expression might be instructive for aestheticians in the analysis they bring to art-making itself.