Author: aestheticsgroup

 

Cathy O’Carroll presented a paper ‘Local identity & national brand: contesting ‘amateur’ identity through scenography’ at the annual conference of this internationally respected research association where I’m a member of the Scenography working group.. TaPRA exists in order to facilitate research through and into theatre and performance.

This paper interrogates the interrelation of scenography and local/national identity within hyper consumerist constructions of culture that seek to instrumentalise the arts in the service of economic goals as part of a national ‘brand’. Current funding policy tends to conflate ‘art’ as public sphere with economic and ameliorative concerns, conceiving identity in terms of design and management. Disinterested spectatorship and performance practices conceived in terms of excellence, innovation and ambition are valorised within this milieu and local subjective interest is disenfranchised and relegated as ‘amateur’.

http://tapra.org/archive/the-2016-tapra-conference/

 

 

 

The conference theme was “Presenting the Theatrical Past. Interplays of Artefacts, Discourses and Practices” and addressed questions concerning our relationship to theatre history. My paper ‘AUTHORED SITE AS ‘AMATEUR’ SPACE’  responded to the conference theme, examining the interrelationship between scenography and site in the work of Dublin based company Anu Productions’.

Cathy O’Carroll’s paper considered examines the interrelationship of scenographic authoring of space in site based, historical performance within processes of contemporary transformation. It questions whether professional expectations of arts practice, the means by which it is considered legitimate, enforce a filter that, despite the egalitarian intent of the artist, can undermine any political efficacy.

Click to access book-of-abstracts-iftr-2016.pdf

 

Friday 10^th June 2016

1.30-2.30pm (IST) Dublin

2.30-3.00pm (CET) Barcelona

There shall be a communion between the formal impulse and the material impulse – that is, there shall be a play instinct – because it is only the unity of reality with the form, of the accidental with the necessary, of the passive state with freedom, that the conception of humanity is completed. (Schiller, Letter XV)

In recent years there has been a noticeable turn to education in aesthetic theory and practice. A number of theorists including Jacques Rancière, Grant Kester and Doris Sommer have returned to Friedrich Schiller’s Letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Why?

We warmly invite you to an international conversation on the topic of Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetics Education of Man involving a live feed link between a seminar on the topic of “the Educational Turn in Aesthetics” as part of the Creative Agency in Local Communities conference in DIT Grangegorman, Dublin and the European Society for Aesthetics 8^th Annual Conference in University of Barcelona. The seminar in Dublin will host an audience of art practitioners and educators including Professor Doris Sommer (Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University). The conference in Barcelona will host an audience of philosophers of art.

The conversation will be hosted by GradCAM’s Aesthetics Research Group, Connell Vaughan and Mick O’Hara in Barcelona and Jeanette Doyle and Cathy O’Carroll in Dublin. The conversation seeks to marry aesthetic theory, practice and policy and their associated communities. Participation by attendees of both conferences to the conversation is welcomed and integral to this event.

This conversation will continue with a consideration of practice through an introduction to the first Department of Ultimology.

http://www.departmentofultimology.com

http://www.gradcam.ie

Connell and Mick will be presenting at the upcoming:

The Beautiful Game: The Poetics and Aesthetics of Soccer in Transnational Perspective | University of Basel, June 30-July 2, 2016

Our paper will be titled:

“Caveman stuff”: Ireland’s Soccer Struggle with Identity, Style and Success

In the paper we will be analysing, discussing and playing with notions and questions of style and success of the Republic of Ireland National Men’s soccer team. This will hinge on an analysis of identity and how it informs and shapes the perception of Irish football both home and away.

Should be fun.

Just submitted our most recent abstract for the European Society for Aesthetics Conference 2016. Here’s hoping…

Currently writing up an abstract for the European Society for Aesthetics Conference 2016 in Barcelona! A provisional title:

An Exercise in Managing Participation; Community and Aesthetics

exploring the designing and mediation of communities through aesthetic theory and funding policy. Coming along nicely…

The Aesthetics Group have produced for the European Society for Aesthetics 7th Annual Conference an essay, titled Turn, turn, turn: Civic Instrumentalisation and the Promotion of Autonomy in Contemporary Arts Funding, reflecting on the economic instrumentalisation of Arts policy in contemporary Ireland.

The Aesthetics Research Group with Curator Kate Strain