Falk Heinrich

This book develops an original theory of performative beauty by reconsidering and reworking Deweyan pragmatic aesthetics through the lens of somaesthetics, contemporary embodiment theories, and philosophies of play. While philosophical aesthetics has traditionally focused on beauty as a property of external objects, this book explores beauty as an enacted experience that emerges through our own actions and somatic practices. The author draws on his own experiences with Argentine tango and other somatic practices to challenge conventional Western epistemological distinctions between subject and object, agency and patiency, and artist and audience. Through an exploration of concepts such as somaesthetic awareness, unity, aesthetic presence, objectivisation, transaction, playfulness, and consummation, the author constructs a comprehensive framework for understanding beauty as a sentient enactment of playful transactions between the human being and their environment. This pragmatist approach responds to our contemporary moment, where beauty is regaining epistemological, existential, political, and economic value across diverse domains of human experience. Performative Beauty is a valuable resource for researchers and advanced students interested in philosophical aesthetics, pragmatism, somaesthetics, and performativity studies, as well as practitioners interested in the aesthetic dimensions of dance, yoga, and other somatic practices.

This book develops an original theory of performative beauty. Philosophical aesthetics has largely neglected one's own actions as a potential experience of the beautiful. Throughout the book, the author uses own experiences of Argentine tango as a case study; one important incentive for social dancing is to have pleasurable and beautiful experiences. This book begins by investigating the methodological causes for why beauty in modernity has been seen to result only from contemplating external objects. It then builds a theory of performative beauty that incorporates findings from new phenomenology, neuroaesthetics, enactivism, and somaesthetics and that reassesses existing inquiries of beauty. The result is an account that identifies kinaesthetic awareness as the point of emergence of both theory and practice, of creation (poiesis) and perception (aisthesis), and of moving (agency) and being moved (reception). Performative beauty is the pleasure of being moved by the dance where the dancer feels both as a creative improvisor and as an integrated part of the activity itself. A Somaesthetics of Performative Beauty - Tangoing Desire and Nostalgia will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, dance studies, performance studies and related fields of artistic research.

The chapter argues that the aesthetics of participatory art discloses a veiled and hidden aspect of Kantian aesthetics. Kant regarded the purposeless interplay of imagination and understanding as the primary foundation for subjective aesthetic judgments. The chapter shows that this interplay between imagination and understanding not only yields pleasurable contemplation, but it also harbours agency in the form of possible action. However, this poietic dimension can only be made aesthetically available, if the conceptual part of a work of art points that out. Participatory works of art conceptually and performatively include participant actions into the unfolding of the particular artwork. After clarifying the notion of participation, the chapter elaborates on the aesthetic function and significance of the interplay between imagination phenomena) and conceptual understanding. In participatory aesthetics, imagination supports agency by imagining a possibility field and conceptual understanding reveals itself to be an instance of fictionalisation, cognitively framing perception and action. In the chapter theoretical elaborations are initiated by and its findings exemplified through an analysis of Maria Sester’s participatory artwork, Sester.

This book investigates the notion of beauty in participatory art, an interdisciplinary form that necessitates the audience's agential participation and that is often seen in interactive art and technology-driven media installations. After considering established theories of beauty, for example, Plato, Alison, Hume, Kant, Gadamer and Santayana through to McMahon and Sartwell, Heinrich argues that the experience of beauty in participatory art demands a revised notion of beauty; a conception that accounts for the performative and ludic turn within various art forms and which is, in a broader sense, a notion of beauty suited to a participatory and technology-saturated culture. Through case studies of participatory art, he provides an art-theoretical approach to the concept of performative beauty; an approach that is then applied to the wider context of media and design artefacts.