Any definition of democracy is relative to the country that claims it as an organising political principle. Aesthetic sensibility of growth or retreat in democratic freedom is generated both by comparison between countries and a sense of...
moreAny definition of democracy is relative to the country that claims it as an organising political principle. Aesthetic sensibility of growth or retreat in democratic freedom is generated both by comparison between countries and a sense of home. This paper results from the intertwining of two recent experiences. The first involves the privilege of travel between art galleries in Japan, Iceland, UK, Paris and Cuba. As I travelled paintings and installations involving rowing boats in different locations and from different periods began to inform each other with the emerging theme of the travelling soul in search of order out of chaos.
The second experience involved the chance meeting at a supermarket near my Australian home of a shop assistant who still occupies my original home in the English Midlands. Through this extraordinary coincidence I got to spend a night in the home in which I grew up, only to discover it was full of excellent paintings by a deceased relative all featuring the garden of his home a few streets away. This strange experience of displaced ‘homes’ led to a relative consideration of homes and homeliness, whether ‘hygge’ in Norway or ‘hiraeth’ in Wales, ‘heimwehe’ in Switzerland or ‘hogar’ in Spain, as concepts taken up by anti-democratic popularist movements across the world in thrall to ‘sedentrist’ metaphysics.
Together these experiences produced the idea of an experimental form of art criticism dubbed ‘trajective’ in that it channels the interpretative and emotional energy brought in travelling from artefacts in one location to those in another. Derived from the writings of Augustin Berque, ‘trajective energy’ has been applied as a necessary consideration in the design of urban parks and the directions from which they are approached, but has obvious relevance to art tourism and new forms of instagrammic curation. But as the preserve of elite travellers, would the genre be essentially anti-democratic? Anthony Goldsworthy has critiqued the kudos of the globe-trotting biennale curator for whom ‘auratic presence’ has shifted from being immanent to the original work to the privileged viewer ‘whose authority is borne not by experience but by experiences.’
Popularist sympathisers tend to experience nostalgia for invented parochialisms that are often corporately manufactured for mass consumption. Their target is often the traveller, whether it is the asylum seeker or the elite traveller. Amongst the more generous explanations for the resurgence of sedentrist metaphysics and exclusionist parochialism is psychological retreat from the sheer complexity of a failing globalism in diversified multi-cultural societies under threat of global warming. Could trajective art criticism become reflexive enough to address the disorientation and uncertainty that attends a loss of grip on moral space without condescension towards those excluded from travel - or is such exclusion a predicate of what aesthetic experience in the age of ‘shareholder existence’ now is?
