A Wordy Rendition of My Three Part Focus

1) The qualitys of sense perception: understanding various ways of thinking about aesthetic experience and our connection to the physical world.

-Kant's theory of aesthetic disintrestedness: "0ur pleasure in beauty, in short, is disinterested because we are indifferent to the actual object, which is not itself an object of direct sensual desire. Our pleasure comes from enjoying the free play of our faculties." -Martin Jay's description in "Songs of Experience." I like this idea that the object doesn't have inherent qualities, and that the senses are directly related to the pleasurable experience of art.

-Martin Jay also mentions another idea I liked. Angelika Rauch's psychoanalytical explanation of Kant's "disinterest," that  "...the ultimate desire for the body of the mother to overcome the loss of an original unity, which may be one way to understand the yearning for aesthetic pleasure, is repressed because it is impossible to attain, leading to the displacement of it onto the subject's own senses." To me this has to do with why we enjoy the senses so much in the first place; I think what she's saying is that we use the senses as a way of making up for the lack of unity with the mother... we have this constant desire that can never be fulfilled, and the senses reflect this yearning.

-Merleu-Ponty's sense of "being in the world"; that there isn't a separate intellectual aspect to experience, that the body and the mind are one and we have direct raw experiences with the world around us. I like the idea that the senses are not filters that merely give a partial sense of some objective truth out in the world, but that sense experience is more like direct contact.

2) How interactive multi-sensory art reflects these perceptual theories.

-Artworks that incorporate screen interfaces seem to reflect our visual culture that places sight at the top of the sensual hierarchy.  What's going on when art incorporates bodily interaction and the other senses too?  One example is Janet Cardiff's 2004 work, "Night Canoeing" that incorporates a video display of a canoe trip on a dark night with speakers that play out the sound of the paddles against the water.  Does this work replicate a sense of "being in the world"?  Is the video screen in this piece the result of our preoccupation with vision? Are we really as visual as we think we are if the sound elements in this art add so much to it?

Night Canoeing: http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/inst/nightcanoeing.html

-I'm working on coming up with examples that directly relate to the theories of perception I will discuss.  They will be my forms of evidence. eg. can I find a work that represents the sense of loss/lack accredited to our aesthetic/sensual fascinatins as described by Rauch?

3) What occurs when this type of art is housed in a museum context. 

-Is the museum hoping to heighten visitors' sensual awareness of the world as seen through the work of artists? Are the motivations of contemporary art museums today similar to those of the renaissance - to improve society through the aesthetic (and sensual) experience of artworks created by genius artists?

-What is the motivation for taking works of art from other contexts into museum spaces?  What affect does this have on perception?  What about art that is meant to exist in the gallery?