Temporary Sculpture

Lance Pearce, Untitled (2010), Photography.

                     

An “explicit reflection on the quotidian cannot but indicate the possibility of its breakdown, since its everyday quality is interrupted by reflection”.

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007, 41.

Temporary Sculpture: An Introduction

This project explores the role of subjectivity and perception through the aesthetic consideration of everyday objects. My goal is to articulate that the world is more than 'simply there', by attending to the familiar in an effort to bring the everyday to notice. This endeavour responds to the notion that "everydayness is not a quality of the world, but of consciousness and its habitual orientation" (Gosetti-Ferencei, 14). Of relevance is phenomenology which extends the description of the world as simply matter, to being the subject of philosophical inquiry.

The author Jennifer Anna Gosetti Ferencei contends that modern art, in its attending to perception and received ideas - and to the ordinary quality of objects - privileges experiences of the sublime. Here, modern art is located as a concern with formalist art object making. However, I afford everyday things the status of art objects. As such, this project breaks with the notion of art object making as mimesis, formalism or the spectator-object relations of Minimal art. The difference rests in its reinterpretation of pre-existent things themselves. In addition, this reflection occurs outside the art institution and as such differs from the strategy of the Duchampian readymade. My additional interest is in the liminal space between the quotidian “thingness” of the selected objects and their designated status as art objects based on aesthetic judgment.

Note: this project extends my investigation into the material and formal aspects of art and its descriptions in relation to its ontological nature.

Lance Pearce

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature,' University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.