On the practical day-to-day level of working, the vocabulary of art leads us into […] false certainties, foolish mastery, and into repetition, which is surely a sin against the future. There is no need to worry about losing one’s base or ‘identity’ […] when situated within a new set of objects and social environment. The task is to focus on that moment and to work (or, I might say, ‘to act’). If one rings too well-planned a strategy and ‘experience’ to the task, one remains in some personal past, and begins to make lies.

The Native American (Cherokee) artist, essayist and poet has proposed substituting the noun ‘art’ with the verbs ‘work’ and ‘act’. Introduction to Sami Art and Aesthetics, Aarhus University Press, 2017.

The philosopher Michael Kelly thinks of aesthetics as ‘critical thinking about the affective, cognitive, moral, political, technological, and other historical conditions constitutive of the production, experience, and judgement of art.’ Aesthetics, then, should be regarded as more than questions of beauty, sublimity, autonomy, intentionality, expression, meaning, etc. With regard to projects of art, aesthetics may also invigorate ethical and political issues, the uncanny or the abject, the nature-based or site-specific, the processual or relational, or the like.

Unstable Categories of Art and People by Svein Aamold; introduction to Sami Art and Aesthetics, Aarhus University Press, 2017

I have always said that place is crucial. There is no globalisation on the basis of a series of dilutions into thin air. Because if there is dilution, there is no relation. Relation can weave itself only between entities that continue to exist…The true relation is not from the particular to the universal, but from the Place to the world-totality, which is not totalitarian but the opposite: diversity.

p69 – Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity, The Glissant Translation Project, trans. Celia Britton, Liverpool University Press, 2020

‘The ecological society to come, then, must be a bit haphazard, broken, lame, twisted, ironic, silly, sad. Yes, sad, in the sense meant by a character in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who: sad is happy for deep people. Beauty is sad like that. Sadness means there’s something you can’t quite put your finger on. You can’t quite grasp it. You have no idea who your boyfriend really is. This is not my beautiful wife. Which means in turn that beauty isn’t graspable either, beauty as such – which means that beauty must be fringed with some kind of slight disgust, something that normative aesthetic theories are constantly trying to wipe off. There needs to be this ambiguous space between art and kitsch, beauty and disgust. A shifting world, a world of love, of philos. A world of seduction and repulsion, rather than authority. Of truthiness rather than rigid true versus rigid false.’

Timothy Morton, All Art is Ecological p17 – Penguin Green Ideas 3

‘”This is not my beautiful house…’ And this is because things are mysterious, in a radical and irreducible way. Mysterious comes from the Greek muein, which means to close the lips. Things are unspeakable. And you discover this aspect of things, as if you could somehow feel that un-feelability, in the beauty experience, or as Keats puts it, the feel of not to feel it. This ‘and you may find yourself’ tentative hesitant subjunctive quality isn’t just a temporary blip and it certainly isn’t a phenomenon that only occurs to sentient beings, let alone conscious ones, let alone human ones. It’s sort of everywhere, because being isn’t presence.’

Timothy Morton, All Art is Ecological pp11-12 – Penguin Green Ideas 3

If left to devices your own

Uniquely structured your

Sentence unfolds

Communication topographic

Not linear

You Might be autistic my dear

You Might Be Autistic – twitter

‘Artists: Too directed a ‘meaning’ in your work takes the work away from art’s startlingly languageless country. To simply ‘understand’ diminishes pleasure; points too narrowly. When we don’t apprehend, it extends art as something to look at further.’

Sonia Boue

“I started creating anthropomorphic vessels as a way to connect with these ancient stirrup spout vessels made by the Moche in Peru. It’s a way of sort of revering the animals for their incredible capabilities and honouring people at the same time. Cos we’re all sort of closely related, plants, animal, humans, we’re all closely related. This is the theme which has been permeating throughout my life. I think its in my blood somehow. 

Indigenous ways are not lost. Indigenous people are here. I’m just trying to tap into some of that native language, as a way to keep these epistemes and these ancient ways of thinking alive.” Karen Jaimes’s bold political sculpture | Testudo Studio Spotlights