Susan Best offers a new approach to thinking about the role of politically engaged art in her book Reparative Aesthetics. Opening up a new field of aesthetics, Susan Best identifies how the reparative aesthetic can be employed to address shameful histories through examining the work of four women photographers from the southern hemisphere. Rosângela Rennó, Anne Ferran, Fiona Pardington, and Milagros de la Torre, whom make a break from the anti-aesthetic tradition by prioritizing critique over aesthetic engagement by focusing on other aesthetic traditions such as beauty, expression, feeling and discernment. To engage audiences with these histories, these artists use a complex array of aesthetic strategies to transform the feelings of shame around them.
Susan Best suggest one approach to confronting shame in art is by ‘recasting the viewer as a witness in response to this art of real events; debate about the cultural significance of affect, guilt and shame; and the reconsideration of the importance of aesthetics.’ [1] It is significant to note that the reprative position is not about fixing or reversing damage, but is an act to shed a new light that incorporates both positive and negative feelings. This ambivalent stance counters paranoid inquiry that favors an ‘exposure’ by attenuating guilt. Shame is a ‘self-aware and self-conscious response, which is triggered by the sense of being observed or judged.’ [2] This implies that the person who bares the shame is separated physically from the event, but through being observed is able to return to their own skin. Observation has the ability to act as a form of grounding and self-reflection.
It is vital in my work to consider traditional aesthetic strategies that I can utilize to confront the shame present in the histories depicted. It is important to consider not only the individuals trauma and how this is represented but also how this trauma could affect others that engage with the work through observation.
Notes:
Susan Best, Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 2
Ibid, 25