[SYMPOSIUM] BOOK CLUB
#14 O’Sullivan: The Aesthetics of Affect
Friday, 13 January 2017, 18:00 – 20:30
Louise House, Dartmouth Rd, London SE23 3HZ
Chaired by Katie Tysoe
Free, fully booked
In January 2017 we will be reading The Aesthetics of Affect by Simon O’Sullivan (2001). This discussion will be chaired by Katie Tysoe.
DOWNLOAD: O’Sullivan, Simon (2001). The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art Beyond Representation. Angelaki, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 125-135.
![Wassily Kandinsky [1923] Circles in a Circle. Oil on canvas, 98.7 x 96.6 cm.](https://artandcritique.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Wassily-Kandinsky-1923-Circles-in-a-Circle.-Oil-on-canvas-98.7-x-96.6-cm-923-350x360.jpg)
My own interest in the text stems from an fascination with the sonic arts and situating sonic practice within a wider artistic field. Recent texts (Seth Kim-Cohen, Barrett) have tried to theorise sound as beyond materiality within the arts in order to reinstall a conceptual theorisation of our experience as representational. This basis is formed through linguistic and textual narratives with an orientation of ideas over matter. However, as I would like to discuss, how can we explore art and thus our experience of it in a way that reimagines how we are being in the world? How is sound particularly effective at enabling this access?
– Does art have a specific function or use that makes it important? P125
– Does O’Sullivan effectively address the representational within art through his critique of Marxist and Deconstructive accounts of art history? P125-126
– How do ‘affects’ relate to our own experiences with an artwork or art practice? P126
– Is experience central to our encounter with a work of art? P126
– Is the art object no longer useful at explaining our relation to art within contemporary practice? Should art be considered more like an ‘event’ or ‘zone’? p127
– Why is the production of subjectivity important for O’Sullivan? P128
– By restoring aesthetics and therefore affects to art, does O’Sullivan present an ethical dimension through his recourse to subjectivity? P129
– Can art enable us to reimagine our place and connection to the world? Is O’Sullivan theorizing art in a way that it bears a lot of responsibility? P129-130