Towards a Post-Formalist Aesthetics
Art History
Final Report Abstract
The aim of the research project ‘Towards a Post-formalist Aesthetics’ was to develop a conceptual toolkit for an aesthetics that would move beyond the antinomy between formalism and antiformalism and that would complement the work carried under the banner of post-formalism in art history by David Summers and Whitney Davis. Aesthetic postformalism moves beyond the antinomy between formalism and anti-formalism by both (i) denying (contra formalism) that the aesthetic appreciation of an object’s formal configuration provides universal access to its aesthetic status and (ii) claiming (contra anti-formalism) universal access to at least some conditions of aesthetic statuses. Such an aesthetics models the art object as an artefact commanding attention to its mode of delivery with respect to the visible environment surrounding it. It understands the visual art object broadly as an artefact becoming effective in virtue of attaining an uncommonly striking (or ‘unusual’) visibility. This required explaining (1) what can make the presence of an artefact unusually visible; (2) how can unusual visibility become effective; (3) what ends is it suited to serve. Having studied the possibility of devising a general set of principles for reconstructing the circumstances under which a culturally and/or temporally remote artefact becomes interesting (or menacing) to look at (‘Art’s Visual Efficacy’), I developed a conceptual model for one such universal circumstance, the substitution by image of an absent authority (‘Substitution by Image’). ‘Art’s Visual Efficacy’ is a first-of-its-kind critical evaluation of Anthony Forge’s essays on the visual art of the Abelam, and ‘Substitution by Image’ is the first philosophical treatment of pictorial substitution as a topic central to recent discussions in the so-called ‘iconic turn’ in art history. One of the lessons I drew from this work was a clearer grasp of the limits of aesthetic analysis: it is easier to identify general patterns of attracting or commanding visual attention – in the case of pictures: patterns of configuring figurative content – than it is to reconstruct modes of attracting aesthetic attention. Furthermore, I engaged in print directly two contemporary post-formalists (Whitney Davis and Bence Nanay) and challenged them to take seriously the prospects and potential impact of a truly post-formalist aesthetics. I clearly delineated what is at stake in recovering remote aesthetic statuses and what place this task has in the more general recovery of past or remote public modes of use. The resulting two essays deal with the potential for an objective general visual style analysis and with the current status of aesthetics in archaeological theory respectively.
Publications
-
"Art’s Visual Efficacy: The Case of Anthony Forge’s Abelam Corpus’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 67/68 (2016/17): 78–93
Jakub Stejskal
-
‘A Post-culturalist Aesthetics? A Commentary on Davis’s “Visuality and Vision”’, Estetika 54 (2017): 267–76
Jakub Stejskal
-
‘The Substitution Principle Revisited’, Source: Notes in the History of Art 37 (2018): 150–57
Jakub Stejskal
-
On the Historical Reconstruction of Aesthetic Attention: A Comment on Bence Nanay’s Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception’, Studi di Estetica 47 (2019): 233–39
Jakub Stejskal
-
‘Substitution by Image: The Very Idea’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 77 (2019): 55–66
Jakub Stejskal
