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Ines Kleesattel: Situated Aesthetics for Relational Critique
Situated Aesthetics for Relational Critique
(p. 181 – 197)

Ines Kleesattel

Situated Aesthetics for Relational Critique
On Messy Entanglements from Maintenance Art to Feminist Server Art

PDF, 17 pages

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Ines Kleesattel

Ines Kleesattel

is an art theorist and philosopher, teaching and researching at Zurich University of the Arts. Her research interests are political aesthetics, critical theories, situated knowledges in artistic research, aesthetics of post-colonial translocality, and the poetics of theory. Among the books she (co)authored are: Politische Kunst-Kritik. Zwischen Rancière und Adorno (Turia+Kant, 2016), The Future is Unwritten. Position und Politik kunstkritischer Praxis (Diaphanes, 2018); Polyphone Ästhetik. Eine kritische Situierung (transversal texts, 2019).
Other texts by Ines Kleesattel for DIAPHANES
Shusha Niederberger (ed.), Cornelia Sollfrank (ed.), ...: Aesthetics of the Commons

What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a ‘pirate’ library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art can play an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic; that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially.

 
Aesthetics of the Commons examines a series of artistic and cultural projects—drawn from what can loosely be called the (post)digital—that take up this challenge in different ways. What unites them, however, is that they all have a ‘double character.’ They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are ‘operational’ in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems. The first aspect raises questions about the kind of aesthetics that are being embodied, the second creates a relation to the larger concept of the ‘commons.’ In Aesthetics of the Commons, the commons are understood not as a fixed set of principles that need to be adhered to in order to fit a definition, but instead as a ‘thinking tool’—in other words, the book’s interest lies in what can be made visible by applying the framework of the commons as a heuristic device.