Beholding: Situated Art and the Aesthetics of Reception

This 120,000 word monograph, Beholding: Situated Art and the Aesthetics of Reception, is published by Bloomsbury, and includes 9 colour plates and 66 black and white images. Written within the broad remit of the aesthetics of reception, the book proposes a theory of beholding situated art. The book is the first comprehensive monograph to apply reception aesthetics not only to painting, but to contemporary art. As such, it constructs a philosophically informed and transhistorical theory of the distinctive phenomenal encounter at least some situated or in situ art affords, and the beholder’s constitutive role therein.

This considers beholding as a process, and one of the key contentions is that situated works perform a locative function, in terms of providing indexical cues as to the position the beholder must adopt in order to place herself in the requisite experiential connection to the work’s meaning. Here, the beholder is allocated a role, namely to complete the incomplete in works that are ‘transitive’ as opposed to ‘intransitive’ (i.e. are completed by the anticipated presence of the spectator). This brings the beholder’s ideational and imaginative capacities into play, often in terms of problematizing the beholder-position. Collectively, the in situ and situated artworks considered are juxtaposed to the Greenbergian notion of the artwork as a self-sufficient, autonomous whole.

The book is structured around twelve artworks and twelve theorists – philosophers, art historians and critics – such that each chapter constructs an extended dialogue between artwork and text. This includes works by Masaccio, Titian, Holbein, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Goya, El Lissitzky, Anthony Caro, Agnes Martin, Yoko Ono, Mary Miss and Bruce Nauman. The chapters are thematically grouped into four parts: ‘Sacred Imagery’; ‘Group Portraiture’; ‘Abstraction’; ‘Intermedia’.