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CONFERENCE/LECTURE

FROM SOIOLOGICAL ART TO THE AESTHETICS OF COMMUNICATION

MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) List Visual Arts Center

Cambridge, Tuesday, September 20, 2011, 6:30pm

Wiesner Building E-15 Bartos

Theatre/lower atrium level

20 Ames St., Cambridge, MA 02139

From Sociological Art to The Aesthetics of Communication, A lecture by Fred Forest at MIT List Visual Arts Center (*)

What has now led me to set out the basis of a new form of aesthetics, which I term Communication Aesthetics, is the gulf which I have noticed between our awareness as people involved in contemporary society, and this same society's prevailing discourse on art. I believe, in fact that the bulk of artistic production of our age, as produced in response to market forces ant their inherent network, is no longer appropriate to the deeper awareness of people or our time. This production, entirely based on a system of references which take it back to to the past, almost never constitutes a language specific to the age in which we live. This split is serious insofar as it shows to what extent economic pressure is capable of generating artistic production alien to contemporary preoccupations, and generated in an artificial manner by the " art network ".

Communication Aesthetics takes up a clear stance on this ground. Its position lies beyond the market and institutional systems. Communication Aesthetics is neither a philosophical theory of Beauty, nor a phenonology, nor an experimenta psychology of perception, nor still less an academic discourse on the Arts. Its more modest claim is an attempt to apprehend what constitutes for a given society (ours), at a given moment in history, the universe accessible to its perception. In etymological termes, the word " aesthetics " designates the understanding of that which is perceptible. There is no question of holding forth on some abstract category, but rather on attempting to understand how he world of the perceptible directly affects us as people. Even if we are not yet fully conscious of it, contemporary aesthetics is an aesthetics which springs from an awareness of communication. This is something which we must make an effort to discern, for our own universe remains one which we have been conditioned to see through millenia of acculturation... An aesthetics in the uniquely philosophical tradition is no longer sufficient for us to understand that which is perceptible today. The field must be widened. Academic doors must be battered down, the constraints of universities with their over-specialisation anc compartmentalisation must be done away with. Communication Aesthetics, the principles of which are being set out here, strives to integrate experiences drawn from philosophy, but also from the social sciences, the physical sciences, and anything else, science or otherwise, which can throw light upon its subject:
the perceptible. Today qe live in a world in which everything is closely interlinked, a world in which biological, psychological, social and environmental phenomena are interdependent. A systemic approach is called for, in order to attain the " sphere " of the perceptible. Yesterday's discursive viewpoint is no longer capable of satisfying us. What is going on at the moment, even if we cannot always see it, is the re-formulation or our concept of Reality. Through the progressive modification of our value systems, our thought systems and our perceptions, we are manifestly passing from a mechanistic view of reality to a holistic conception. The world of communication, the chain-link structure of its networks, the notion of interactivity which are particular to it, all of these lead us into other types of mental schemas. Communication Aesthetics falls in naturally in this tendency.

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