Fissions in the sensitive tissue of the living: the aesthetic experience in three bioartistic creations about semi-living, the extinction of distant lives and the death of nearby lives

Abstract

Through this article, I aim to understand the aesthetic experience in three bioartistic creations: Victimless Utopia (2003-2006) by TC&A, Malamp: Reliquaries (2001-) by Brandon Ballengée y Mother and Child (Divided) (1993) by Damien Hirst. I started from a qualitative hermeneutic-phenomenological approach based on the proposal of sensory ethnography. Through anthropological indepth interviews, as well as an autoethnography, I explored the dialogue that eleven spectators, of heterogeneous characteristics, developed around the pieces, in order to understand our aesthetic experience. I found that the aforementioned works of art put in crisis our notion of the unitary and certain pernicious dualisms of Western thought, which gives rise to monstrosity, through the fission of the sensitive fabric, hyperesthesia and dissent. During this process, new categories of thought emerged, like semi-living, distant life and nearby life. I was able to conclude that the aesthetic experience can be structured according to the identification of ways of twisting the sensitive fabric, the questioning of common sense, affective mobilization and dissent. My contribution consists in proposing an approach to the aesthetic experience of the monstrous which allows to specify how the mode of twisting the sensitive fabric is articulated with the crisis of dualistic thought and with the possibility of reconfiguring reality.