embodied-enTAnglements/ enTAngled-embodiments performaTIVe encounters with materials, creative process, and the artist-woman’s body

Corporeality / Sensoriality / Materiality: Body-centered interpretations of South African art

Abstract

This article explores the changing role of the audience within aesthetic encounters. It is framed within a shift in the nature of these encounters away from the primacy of vision, and towards experiential encounters within the body of the audience. I approach the article as self-reflexive autoethnography, assuming dual roles: in the first place as maker, and then describing my heightened bodily response as audience or experiencer to an immersive constellatioN of forms I made. In the next section, I unpack how experiential aesthetic encounters of this type unseTTle and disorientate traditional understandings of material forms and aesthetic relationships. Meaning is no longer situated within visual representation, but is made rather in situ and in actu within the subjective embodied experience of the experiencer who becomes part of the artwork. The final section recognises the porosity of boundaries between the subject and object, observer and observed, and artist and audience through exploration of the enTAngled relationship between the experiencer, my creative labour as the maker, and the vitalised materials that constitute my constellatioN.

I conclude by showing how creative proceSSes have unique power to mobilise experiential materiality in a way that establishes an embodied coNNection within the body of the receptive experiencer. This embodied coNNection enables a reorientation from head-based intellectual analysis, Cartesian binaries and focus on visual representation. By activating the whole-body of the experiencer and the embodied coNNection between audience-maker-artform, possibilities are generated for expanding and deepening interhuman relations, thereby signalling a return to forms of knowledge produced from and by the body.