Paul Crowther 
Art and the Reconfiguration of Contemporary Experience 
Introduction 
In his celebrated essay 'Modernity: An Incomplete Project'Jiirgen Habermas 
addresses the issue of how aesthetic experience can be reintegrated into the 
life world. He observes that 
Albrecht Wellmer has drawn my at tention to one way that an aesthetic 
exper ience which is n o t f r a m e d a round the experts ' critical j u d g e m e n t 
of taste can have its significance altered: as soon as such an experience 
is u s e d to i l l umina t e a l ife-historical s i tuat ion and is re la ted to life 
problems, it enters in to a language game which is no longer that of the 
aes the t i c critic. T h e aes the t ic expe r i ence then not only renews the 
i n t e r p r e t a t i o n of o u r n e e d s in whose light we perceive the world. It 
p e r m e a t e s as well o u r cogni t ive s ign i f ica t ions a n d o u r n o r m a t i v e 
expecta t ions and changes the m a n n e r in which all these moments refer 
to o n e another . 1 
Habermas illustrates his point by using an example from Peter Weiss's 
The Aesthetics of Resistance. Weiss describes a group of young workers in Berlin 
in 1937, who, though evening-classes acquire a knowledge of the general 
and social history of European art. Habermas notes that 
O u t of the resilient edifice of this objective mind, embod ied in works 
of art which they saw again and again in the museums in Berlin, they 
s t a r t e d r e m o v i n g t h e i r own ch ips of s t o n e , which they g a t h e r e d 
t o g e t h e r a n d r e a s s e m b l e d in the con tex t of their own mil ieu. This 
mil ieu was far r emoved f r o m that of t radi t ional educa t ion as well as 
f r o m the t h e n exist ing regime. These young workers went back and 
fo r th be tween the edifice of European art and their own milieu unti l 
they were able to i l luminate both.2 
Even if we i n t e r p r e t 'chips of s tone ' he re in bo th a literal and 
metaphorical sense, Habermas's example is not compelling. For to steal such 
chips of stone (or, in the metaphorical reading) fragments of art historical 
knowledge and to reassemble them in a different context, is, at best, a use 
of art. Essentially found objects are taken from their high art context in order 
1 Jiirgen Habermas 'Moderni ty-An Incomplete Project' included in Postmodern Culture, 
ed. Hal Foster, Pluto Press, London 1985, pp. 3-15. This reference, p. 13. 
2 Habermas in Foster ibid. p. 13. 
Filozofski vestnik, XX (2/1999 - XIVICA), pp. 127-135. 127 
Paul Crowther 
to yield broader existential knowledge. Why this should count as aesthetic 
experience is, alas, not clarified by Habermas. 
The example is, nevertheless, instructive in a much broader sense, both 
negatively and positively. In negative terms, the strategy embodied in 
Habermas's example is one that prefigures the limits and ultimate failure 
of much conceptual art. Such art is putatively a means of wresting meaning 
back form the critic, and investing it in the ideas of the artist. It appears even 
to have a democratising function in that it allows the use of — in principle -
any material, any object, all in all any means to get the artist's idea across. 
No 'skills' are necessary. Hence in its subversion of traditional art methods, 
this seems an ideal way for specific individuals, social groups, and (especially) 
marginalised minorities, to illuminate and declare their experiences. 
Such illumination is, however, massively restricted. For whilst the 
activities of the Berlin workers considered by Habermas (or indeed the 
activities of most conceptual artists) may give the people concerned some 
existential fulfilment, they do no more than that. Such fulfilment is not only 
substantially non-aesthetic in character, but also (since it lacks an inter-
subjectively valid code of articulation which would enable it to illuminate 
more general contexts) it is hugely localised in character. Unless the artist 
explains the intent ion and significance of the object , its mean ing is 
unavailable. The road is thus clear for the critic to step in. And this is the 
supreme irony. Of all the artistic idioms it is conceptually based ones which 
affirm the hegemony of that insidious, priestly class of curators, critics, and 
art historians, who dominate the contemporary art scene. If such works are 
to illuminate the life world in a genuine objective sense, as opposed to the 
narrow context of their point of origination, then they require a critic to 
speak for them and through them.3 
Now it might seem that the only a l te rna t ive to this is equal ly 
unacceptable. It would involve a reversion to the traditional specialised 
practices of high art, and, accordingly, to modernist critical practices based 
on the primacy of form. However, this alternative is not inevitable. 
We are led therefore to the positive implicat ions of Habermas ' s 
example. It has two aspects. The first is that if artistic form is to be a vital 
element in life world experience, it must have the capacity to offer aesthetic 
illumination of personal and group situations. The second is the possibility 
that this can be achieved through the fragmentation and reconfiguration of 
the historical continuum. Habermas seems to see this as a more demo-
3 A sustained critique of conceptual art can be f o u n d in Chapter 8 of my The Language 
of Twentieth-Century Art: A Conceptual History, Yale University Press, New Haven and 
London, 1997. See especially pp. 171-186. 
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Art and the Reconfiguration of Contemporary Experience 
cratised form of artistic activity. Indeed it can be; but it does not have to be 
in opposition to the more specialist critical judgement of taste. To see why 
this is so, I shall, in the remainder of this paper, set out the basis of a 
distinctive form of art practice. Its origins extend far back in to the century 
with the development of photomontage by Man Ray, John Heartfield and 
others. The essence of photomontage is to combine multiple photographs, 
and (sometimes) other visual material, into a single image. This can involve 
a simple juxtaposition of photographs, or the use of cutaway fragments of 
prints, in which latter case, we might justifiably speak of photo-collage. 
There is a crucial question which must be asked about such a practice, 
namely does it matter that the image is derived solely from photographs 
taken by the artist him or herself? The verdict of history so far has been, in 
practical terms, no. Artists working in this idiom have, by and large, been 
willing to use photographs taken by both themselves and others in composing 
the final image. However, historical circumstances have changed. What if a 
form of photo-collage developed which was founded on the convention that 
the photo-collage should be composed exclusively from photographs taken 
by the artist? At first sight this might seem like an arbitrary stipulation about 
how photo-collage should be done. But is not. Photo-collage is, like all visual 
idioms, predominantly an art of spatial realisation. There is, however, also 
a temporal dimension, which in normal photo-collage, is scattered. We find 
images taken by different people combining different places and times. If 
all the combined photographs or fragments thereof, are, in contrast, taken 
by one individual, what results is a combination of places and times which 
are moments from the continuum of the artist's personal history. Visual 
aspects of events in an individual life are made into an object. We might 
term this form of photo-collage, accordingly, the 'event-object'. Such objects 
- in their conjunction of images - can be developed in a broadly surrealist 
idiom. However, the more the final object is composed from fragments, or 
from photographs disposed so as to mask their own figurative content, the 
more it approximates to the condition of abstract content, the more it 
approximates to the condition of abstract or semi-abstract painting. This 
painterly absorpt ion of photography has a distinctive and remarkable 
ontology which achieves a kind of philosophical illumination. To show this, 
I will first clarify some key characteristics which the Event-Object shares with 
painting qua aesthetic object, and will then go on to outline its distinctive 
inflections of these characteristics. 
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Part One 
Let me begin with some general points about the nature of the aesthetic 
object.4 To perceive the world in any terms at all involves the interaction of 
two mutually dependent basic cognitive capacities - unders tanding and 
imagina t ion . In the fo rmer , sensible pa r t i cu la r s are s u b s u m e d or 
discriminated under a concept or concepts . We have the basic act of 
cognition. This act is only made possible, however, in so far as it is informed 
by the imagination's powers of a t tent ion, recall, and projec t ion . The 
generation of images enables us to relate an immediate object of cognition 
to its past, future, and possible appearances. Imagination, in other words, 
in conjunction with the understanding, serves to stabilise the sensible 
manifold and organises it as a coherent perceptual system. 
Most of our perceptual judgements can be characterised as discursively 
rigid. They involve the application of definite concepts to definite objects 
on the basis of de f in i t e pract ical in teres ts or physiological needs . 
Understanding and imagination are, in this context, tightly bound by the 
following of rules. However, there is one context in which their co-operation 
is much freer. This is in the enjoyment of aesthetic form. In such enjoyment 
we explore the different possibilities of structure in the way an object is made 
present to the senses. And if the object is an artwork, this making present 
involves reference to needs, desires, fantasies and values shared by both artist 
and audience alike by virtue of the c o m m o n condi t ion of e m b o d i e d 
subjectivity. 
The importance pf this is as follows. The discursive rigidity of ordinary 
cognition does not come ready-made; it is achieved through the body's active 
positioning in relation to the perceptual field. Indeed , our part icular 
cognitive acts are informed by a network of more fundamental concepts which 
originate in the body's movements and active manipulation of things. These 
concepts include figure and ground, reality, negation and limitation, and 
unity, plurality and totality. The enjoyment of aesthetic form is one which 
flows out from these. Rather than simply identifying the form as a 'this' or 
'that', we explore the different possibilities of virtual structure which inform 
its appearance. Understanding and imagination interact with relative freedom 
and playfulness. They return us to the mobile origins of perception, and 
the very possibility of conceptualisability. 
Now qua aesthetic form the Event-Object shares in all this. However, it 
does so in an especially perspicacious way. This is because of two factors. 
4 For a full theory of the aesthetic object see Parts I and III of my Art and Embodiment: 
From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness, Clarendon Press, Oxford . 
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Art and the Reconfiguration of Contemporary Experience 
T h e first is tha t pho tographs are mechanical reproduct ions of visual 
experience; the second is that, in the Event-Object, the experiences in 
question are the direct causal traces of moments from a specific person's 
individual life history. Hence, in our aesthetic exploration of such an object, 
the virtual realities which it reconfigures are, in a sense, closer to actual 
experience than are painting or natural forms. There is a more direct and 
intimate link to the being of the artist. The events of seeing which the artist 
has actually experienced - his or her past bodily positionings - are woven 
into a fabric of new appearance. Painting and other visual aesthetic idioms 
embody this in a tacit way; the Event-Object - insofar as we know it to be 
composed from photographs taken by the artist - makes this thematic. 
On these terms, then, whilst all aesthetic form involves the exploration 
of structures of appearance, the Event-Object more clearly locates the origins 
of this structuring - of perception itself - as a function of the individual body, 
its cognitive capacities, and its positioning. 
Now as well as engaging this direct perceptual dimension, our responses 
to artifactual aesthetic forms engage what I shall call the holistic structure of 
experience. This consists in the fact that no single moment in a human life 
exists as an isolated self- subsistent atom. Any present experience is given its 
specific character through the reciprocal relation between what is given in 
that experience and a complex horizon composed of past experiences, our 
anticipation of future ones, and our counterfactual sense of alternative ways 
in which our life might have developed. The individual moment 'contains' 
as it were, the whole of our experience. And with each new moment of 
experience, the character of the horizonal whole is modified. In the passage 
of life each individual moment is contingent - things in the past might have 
happened differently and the way our future will unfold is a developing 
situation. However, once a moment has gone into the past it is a necessary 
part of what we are in the present. Remove or change any moment from a 
person's past then that person's present and future are also changed. 
This holistic structure is one of the necessary conditions of the human 
mode of finite self-consciousness. It is, however, something we are rarely 
aware of, except in a philosophical analysis such as this, or, indirectly, 
through the arts - most notably through painting. Aristotle noted the fact 
that mimesis has an intrinsic fascination for human beings. He did not note, 
however, how the actual process of making is itself involved in this fascination. 
When the painter places brushstrokes on a surface, each new stroke is given 
its character not only by its own qualities but also by its relation to those 
which went before it and those future ones which the artist might be 
anticipating. Reciprocally, this horizonal whole of strokes in place and strokes 
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which might be made, is modified by the execution of the present stroke. 
Of course, areas might be painted over and reworked on the basis of this 
stroke, but, in that case, its significance is changed. The painting-over is a 
causal consequence of this decisive stroke, and serves to aesthetically relocate 
it. 
Now the important point to note is that this process exemplifies the 
holistic structure of experience. This is because the making of a painting 
just is a successive series of experiences in a person's life. It embodies, and 
leaves the traces of a holistic structure. These traces, however, are not part 
of the artist's inner life; they are objectified, i.e. rendered in a publically 
accessible medium. This gives them a special significance. For it means that 
the present in which the painting is completed, is, in principle, eternalised 
- along with all those other moments involved in the process of making. 
The painting marks an episode in the artist's life which has now been brought 
to completion. Of course, any episode in a life can reach a culminating point, 
but it is then absorbed in the on-going holistic development of a person's 
life history. In the painting, however, the episode attains a more fully realised 
comple t ion in that it is embod ied in an ar t i fac t which is physically 
discontinuous from its creator. All the individually contingent moments which 
informed the work's creation are now rendered necessary - as part of the 
full identity of the finished work. And since the f inished work exists 
independently of its creator, he or she and, indeed, the audience can identify 
reflectively with this completed structure of experience, rather than be 
immersed in the experiential flow of moments. 
The painting also manifests the narrative structure of the experiential 
flow. This is because, in applying paint , the artist does so selectively. 
Previously executed areas can be erased or modified on the basis of the 
present stage of composition. Likewise in life, one comprehends and defines 
one's present not as the simple consequence of one past momen t after 
another, but rather selectively as an element in an on-going narrative wherein 
some moments of the past are more important than another. Significantly, 
however, whereas much of ones past is simply forgotten - and forgetting is 
an involuntary act - the artist's erasures and reworkings are voluntary. They 
allow the present to regulate the past volitionally. 
On these terms, then, the painting is not only an object of aesthetic 
pleasure in terms of its structures of appearance, it is so also - and in a much 
deeper way - through its complet ion and re f inemen t of structures of 
experience. There is, however, a limitation; and, again, it consists in the fact 
that the painting's completion of experience is indirect. The evidence for 
this is manifest in the way that, historically, painting has been valued for the 
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messages of its figurative content, or for the beauties of its formal qualities. 
The aesthetic-ontological dimension which I have identified has scarcely 
figured in the explanation of the nature of our aesthetic responses to art. It 
has not been articulated as a convention of appreciation. 
The Event-Object goes some way towards rectifying this lack. In 
juxtaposing and composing photographs and fragments thereof, it manifestly 
exemplifies the structures already alluded to. This is because, of course, the 
photographic material involves direct causal traces of the artist's experience. 
It is composed wholly from such traces. The experiential structure link is here 
virtually inescapable. In fact, it is taken one step further. In painting the work 
is composed in temporally linear terms. Even if one goes back in order to 
erase or rework, this 'going back' is actually metaphorical. Literally, the 
erasure or reworking is another stage forward in temporal terms, from the 
previous stages of work. In the Event-Object, however, the artist can use 
images from the distant past of his or her life on top of images from more 
recent experience. Physically, and in terms of linear time, the far past images 
are here more present than the more recent ones. Here, the linear time of 
the actual process of composition, is subverted by the formal assertiveness 
of material from the distant past. And again this is, in an important respect, 
true to the narrative structure of experience. For the present is often given 
its character more by events in the distant past, than it is by more recent 
happenstances. Even more than in painting, the temporality of the Event-
Object is genuinely experiential. 
We are left, then, with the following situation. The Event-Object uses 
photographs as z/they were the material and means for painting. But it is 
not painting, and neither is it a variety of photography. Rather it forms a 
symbolic means of articulating experience which is inescapably photographic 
and inescapably painterly, but which is reducible to neither. The Event-Object 
is an emergent art form (in every sense) with its own distinctive properties. 
Now as I m e n t i o n e d earl ier , the Event-Object is p re f igured by 
developments in photomontage and photo-collage from earlier on in the 
century. But it has not been systematically worked as a distinctive idiom. One 
reason for this has been the facile progress, or, rather, lack of progress of 
phi losophical aesthetics. A more significant reason is that historical 
circumstances have only now favoured its development. I shall now address 
this factor in my final section. 
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Part Two 
Recent times have been characterised by a rhetoric of deconstruction 
which affirms such factors as the instability and transience of meaning, 
relativity in values, and the decentredness of the self. Now whilst it is true 
that there is a prevailing sensibility of fragmentation in culture, the elements 
in the rhetoric which I have just cited are more its surface manifestations -
intellectual fashion - rather than actual truths about our mode of insertion 
in the world.5 The problem for them is that instability, relativity and 
decentredness, only make sense in the context of a stable spatio-temporal 
continuum of re-identifiable individual material items. Language is the 
means of re-identification in such a context, and involves those powers of 
understanding and imagination which I alluded to earlier. 
Now, at first sight, the Event-Object as an artistic idiom seems very much 
of its t ime. This is because its very essence involves p h o t o g r a p h i c 
fragmentation of the linear continuity of experience. However, as I showed 
earlier, this fragmentation manifests much deeper and more constant 
structures in perception and experience, to which the Event-Object gives its 
own distinctive inflection. Indeed, the Event-Object is also of its time in that 
it is not perse a high-art format. Anyone can cut up and reconfigure snapshots 
so as to create objects with the experiential structures I have described. These 
considerations suggest that the Event-Object would satisfy Habermas 's 
demands of the aesthetic - that it should illuminate personal experience and 
situations, and not be the province of the specialist critic alone. This being 
said, however, it is vital to emphasise that it is not antagonistic to critical 
practice culture. For whilst it is an easily accessible medium, it can be refined 
and developed — perhaps in surprising ways. Keen-sighted critics can keep 
abreast of these factors, po in t ing ou t repe t i t ions , r e f i n e m e n t s a n d 
innovations, as well performing more traditional formal appraisals. The fact 
that systematic pursuit of the Event-Object as an idiom is new, indeed, means 
that the critic is more effectively placed in order to carry out these tasks. 
There is less purely historical ground which has to be mastered. 
Earlier on I mentioned how the Event-Object is photographic and 
painterly but is neither photography nor painting. It breaks clown the barriers 
between these in a way that advances itself as a distinctive idiom, yet at the 
same time, illuminates photography and painting. In respect of the former, 
for example , whilst the symbolic fo rm of mechan ica l ly - r ep roduced 
representation has been massively developed in the form of filmic, televisual, 
5 For a sustained critique of Derrida's version of 'decons t ruc t ion ' see Chap te r O n e of 
my Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993, pp. 25-39. 
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Art and the Reconfiguration of Contemporary Experience 
and video images i.e. in the direction of temporal realisation; its development 
in terms of static, more spatial realisation has been more restricted. The 
Event-Object, however moves us injust this direction. Again, through its use 
of painterly compositional means, it illuminates (in ways shown earlier) the 
experiential structures which inform the act of painting. 
I am arguing, then, that the Event-Object is a more accessible medium, 
yet one which contr ibutes to specialist art practice precisely through 
overcoming some of the boundaries between two such practices. 
Let me now conclude by developing the implications of this in relation 
to the connection of philosophy and art. For a long time philosophers have 
concerned themselves with problems of definition in relation to art per se, 
its ontological properties, and the kind of experiences which we have before 
us. Debates on the definition of art have, I think, led us nowhere. Formalist 
approaches, for example, have told us very little about why aesthetic form 
should be so significant. Institutional definitions seek, in effect, to ratify 
anything which artists choose to call art - a strategy which, in effect, reduces 
art to mere theory or ideas whose connection with the art object only becomes 
manifest when explained linguistically by the artist, critic, or curator. What 
is lost in both approaches is an adequate account of why art has a history, 
why it should lend itself to so many different uses; all in all why art answers 
a distinctive need in human beings. 
What needs to be done, I would suggest, is as follows. We need to clarify 
the symbolic structures of specific media, noting, in particular, the epistemic 
conditions of their legibility i.e. the way in which such symbolic structures 
acquire a communicable meaning which is not tied to accompanying 
explanations from the artist or critic. This means, in effect, a clarification of 
the possibility of effective communicative codes. By revealing the sometimes 
obscure or indirect epistemic conditions which sustain perception of art 
objects the philosopher enables these to henceforth act as an acknowledged 
and explicit convention of reading. He or she thus opens out the possibility 
of new communicative codes in art. 
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