Beholding

Situated Art and the Aesthetics of Reception

Ken Wilder

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English

Bloomsbury Visual Arts
28 December 2023

Theory of art; History of Art & Design Styles; Installation art

Beholding considers the spatially situated encounter between artwork and spectator. It argues that artworks created for specific places or conditions structure a reciprocal encounter, which is completed by the presence of a beholder. These are works which demand the 'beholder's share', but not, as Ernst Gombrich famously claimed, to sustain an illusion. Rather, Beholding reconfigures Gombrich's notion of the beholder's share as a set of 'licensed' imaginative and cognitive projections.

Each chapter frames a particular work of art from the remit of a complementary theoretical text. The book establishes a transhistorical notion of the spatially situated encounter, and considers the role of the architectural host in bringing the beholder’s orientation into play. The book engages a diverse range of practices: from Renaissance painting and group portraiture to intermedia practices of installation and performance art. Written within the broad remit of reception aesthetics, the book proposes a phenomenological theory of beholding, argued through an in-depth examination of artworks and their spatial contexts, selected for their explanatory potential. These various encounters allocate different constitutive roles to the beholder, bringing not only spatial and temporal orientation into play, but also a repertoire of anticipated ideas and beliefs.

By: Ken Wilder
Imprint: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 680g
ISBN: 9781350430716
ISBN 10: 1350430714
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 28 December 2023
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Ken Wilder is Reader in Spatial Design at the Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, UK

Reviews for Beholding: Situated Art and the Aesthetics of Reception

A beautifully-written interdisciplinary book that acknowledges the permeability of the once strong divisions that separated art, architecture, the cinema and design. Artist and theorist Ken Wilder explains, through his theory of beholding, how the audience’s viewing conditions can shape their understanding of an art work. -- Stephen Farthing, artist, UK