The Configurational Encounter and the problematic of Beholding

This is a peer reviewed chapter in the book The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu, an interdisciplinary analysis of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology (published within Routledge’s Culture, Economy and the Social Series). The chapter, ‘The configurational encounter and the problematic of beholding’, is in Part I of the book, entitled ‘Taste and Art’ (edited by Dave Beech). Engaging the aesthetics of reception as its field of inquiry, the chapter draws upon the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the ‘blank’ as a staged suspension of connectivity, arguing for a reassignment of the aesthetic in terms of a ‘configurational encounter’ that problematizes the work/beholder relation. This constitutes a rare attempt to apply reception aesthetics to contemporary art, a ‘gap’ first highlighted by the art historian Michael Ann Holly in her 2002 article ‘Reciprocity and Reception Theory’, published in A Companion to Art Theory. Utilising concrete examples of practice, the chapter asks whether the shift towards inter- or transmedia art practices, characterising postconceptual art, renders Bourdieu’s characterisation of the ‘autonomous’ artwork superfluous to the contemporary situation, and whether the kinds of judgments of taste associated with the acquisition of cultural capital are no longer relevant. The chapter argues that in revealing material processes, rules, instructions or appropriations – and/or its situated reception and apparatus of display – the configurational encounter problematizes the beholder’s bodily and ideological orientation toward an artwork, revealing our embodied dispositions or ‘habitus’. This counters philosopher Peter Osborne’s suggestion that a change in art’s ‘ontology’ post 1960s renders questions of aesthetics obsolete (a prevalent position within contemporary art theory) and reconceives the aesthetic as emerging from the oscillation of spatial and ideational perspective switches (to use Iser’s term) resulting from a calculated problematizing of the beholder’s position-taking.