Aesthetic Negotiations: A Philosopher’s Thoughts on Contemporary Art by Shannon Fitzgerald
Sherri Irvin, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma (OU). She serves on the board of trustees of the American Society for Aesthetics and is editor for the Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art section of Philosophy Compass, Blackwell’s online journal. Her work has been published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, the British Journal of Aesthetics, the Journal of Aesthetic Education, and the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, among others. Her essays have been included in numerous books and anthologies. Shannon Fitzgerald: As a practicing philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Oklahoma, what are your areas of expertise? Sherri Irvin: I specialize in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. My research has two main trajectories: I work on the philosophy of contemporary art and on the aesthetics of the everyday, which focuses on the possibility of having aesthetic experiences in the ordinary moments of everyday life, without having to visit an art gallery or go out to some magnificent natural site. SF: What is your educational background and professional experience that led you to your current position at OU? SI: I studied philosophy as an undergraduate, and I went directly into the PhD program at Princeton, thinking I wanted to work in metaphysics, which is one of the more abstract and technical areas of
philosophy. While I was there I realized that I didn’t want to do that full-time, and I questioned whether philosophy was right for me at all. I transferred to the PhD program in clinical psychology at Rutgers University, but after a couple of years ended up moving to Canada when my partner was hired there. We lived for seven years in the Ottawa area, which houses the National Gallery of Canada and a few smaller non-profit galleries that specialize in contemporary art. I became involved with several of the galleries, and along the way ended up doing research in the curatorial archives of the National Gallery of Canada. This is how I first learned about how much of what we see in a contemporary art space depends on things like the artist’s instructions about how the elements of their installation artworks should be arranged. After I became immersed in the art scene, I started to think about writing in the philosophy of art – I thought that might be something I could be passionate about. I had never taken a class in that area (and I still never have, though I have taught many!), but I wrote to Alexander Nehamas at Princeton and asked him if he would be willing to supervise my dissertation from a distance. He agreed. After all the work was finished and my PhD was awarded, he told me that he never thought it would work. Fortunately he didn’t tell me that! After teaching in Canada for a few years, my partner and I decided to look for jobs that would fit our research interests better, and that’s how we ended up at OU. SF: What most about contemporary art intrigues you and inspires your research? How do you see your role across disciplines in the beginning of the 21st century? SI: What most intrigues me about contemporary art is how the relationship between the artwork (or, as we might call it, the object of our appreciation) and the physical object is attenuated. With traditional paintings and sculptures, it seemed like the artwork was just a physical object; but for many contemporary artworks that can’t be right. For example, I’ve written about one of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s candy spills, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991.1 There isn’t any particular physical object that is essential to this work. Displaying it involves creating a pile of candy that viewers are free to take from, and replenishing the pile from time to time. But the work doesn’t go out of existence if the candies are thrown away in between exhibitions; it is still in the museum’s collection. So the work is something fundamentally different from a physical object like a painting. This means that we, as viewers, have to take a different approach to understanding the artwork. Just looking at a physical object and taking in its visible features isn’t enough; we really need to know something about how and why those particular objects are where they are right now. SF: As one who considers art production in a fluid now, how do you see the relationships between art, art history, and philosophy unfolding in contemporary global discourse? Sigalit Landau, Barbed Salt Lamps (detail), 2007, Barbed wire soaked in Dead Sea salt, dimensions variable.
1 Irvin’s expansive essay “The Ontological Diversity of Visual Artworks” in New Waves in Aesthetics, ed. Kathleen Stock and Katherine Thomson-Jones (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1-19 can be downloaded as a pdf from her website: www.ou.edu/ouphil/faculty/irvin/irvin.html.
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