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Sensation as Participation in Visual Art

The paper takes issue with recent visual art theory and practice that pursue relational, ecological ambitions. As Arnold Berleant, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Grant Kester see it, ecological ambition and artistic form should correspond, but they fail to recognize sensation as a site where the ecological cause can be fought. Jacques Rancière argues for the political force of the senses, but his distribution of the sensible does not address the particularity of sensory experience. Cazeaux responds by developing an account that positions the senses as fundamentally ecological on the grounds that they function as movements along lines of conceptual-sensory connection and implication. This is a model of the senses in which colour is no longer merely colour, and the senses are no longer merely the senses. The colours that an individual perceives, the sounds they hear, etc., are not isolated, personal events, but phenomena that reveal or ‘speak of’ their situation and the situation of others in the world. Cazeaux identifies the difference between the recent relational or ecological approaches of Berleant, Bourriaud, Kester, and Rancière and his own position on sensibility, and indicates some of the problems involved in referring to the senses. He sets out the concepts that are central to the cultivation of relational sensibility: style, autofiguration, and the mobility of sensory meaning, extrapolated from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Paul Cézanne.