For several decades now, the intrusion of art into
the domains of social action has familiarized us with a new artistic paradigm:
participation, the relational, contextuality, pragmatism. All these aspects are
brought together by artists in their practices, as well as by those who comment
on or administer them, opening up a wide field of theoretical and practical
investigation from which emerges the decisive question of the situation. Underpinned
by a desire to open reality up to unpredictable trajectories of experience,
these contemporary practices in art are about working aesthetics back into the praxis of life, into the
living dynamics of experience. Such is the aspiration of the aesthetics of
the situation. How does the concept of situation enrich the syntax of
contemporary art? What prospects does the art of the situation hold for us today
and what critical fortune lies in store for it? Different views of the same subject
will shed new light on the aspirations of an art characterized by the partial elimination
of supporting devices to make way for an aesthetics of the situation, a vector
of reclassification of the realms in
which a contemporary form of creation is practiced, adapted and invented.
Vaast Colson intervenes throughout this issue. His
work is process-based, subject to circumstances. In lieu of illustrating a topic
that is less visual than performative, the artist generates interference in the
reading process as well as in the physical structure of the book itself. By
taking it apart, manipulating its pages and putting it all back together again
by hand, he invests the object with a uniqueness of which the production process
had deprived it. While calling on the reader to make an effort, a contribution,
his approach individualizes the space in which thought is written and lays bare
the medium that conveys it. The point is also not to dissociate the art created
from the theory that critiques it, since each interferes and plays havoc with the
other.
Editor: Sébastien Biset
Essays by Sébastien Biset, Aline Caillet,
Thierry Davila, Jérome Glicenstein, Luc Lévesque and Jean-Philippe Uzel
Art intervention by Vaast Colson
Published in 2009
In French
15 x 20.5 cm
112 pages
ISBN: 978-2-9600632-2-6
EAN: 9782960063226
