Charlotte Sleigh, “Contexts of Encounter: How and Where to Criticise Art and Science.”

摘要

This pregnant, speckled swell of a shell: this too is art.Such a claim is preposterous in a modern, secular world. If there is no creatorthen only humans can make art. A shell is simply a shell, though it may look beautifulto us.Yet things have been changing recently. Bruno Latour (Politics of Nature) andDonna Haraway have been at the vanguard of scholarship that has raised anappreciation of the role of non-human nature (things, critters) in the making of ourworld, our science, our technology, our arts. If we take these scholars seriously, then anon-human agent may, after all, create a work of art. However, such a (re)turntowards non-human nature in the networks of making and being is a tricky move,since it can superficially be confused with the attitude of the scientists who believedthat certain things were real all along. Thus one is unsure what to make of critic LauraCumming, who writes of the bower bird in an art-science exhibition: “[he] has aconcept of beauty that precedes and governs his creation. It [sic] is by definition anartist” (Cumming “Andy Holden & Peter Holden”).