Taking up space: Architecture, Performance Art and the Ethos of Encounter

Rossen Ventzislavov

doi:10.58519/aesthinv.v6i1.14950

Authors

Rossen Ventzislavov Woodbury University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.58519/aesthinv.v6i1.14950

Keywords:

architecture, space, place, encounters, performance art, ethics

Abstract

One of the many innovations with which performance art can be credited is its revolutionary approach to space-making and inhabitation. Its reanimation of objects, events and bodies takes up space as a material presence, which incidentally engenders a conceptual problem. Philosophical aesthetics has had a lot to say about our relationship with the built form, but this work has not been brought to bear on performance art and the ways this artform complicates such relationships. This paper addresses this void by exploring two dimensions of what architect Daniel Libeskind has called ‘the space of encounter’—the physical and the ethical.

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Author Biography

Rossen Ventzislavov, Woodbury University

Rossen Ventzislavov is a philosopher and cultural critic focusing on aesthetics, architectural theory, literature, popular music, and performance art. His work has appeared in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Deleuze Studies, Contemporary Aesthetics, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. Rossen originated the ongoing Boxing Philosophical debate series at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Los Angeles. He has been a member of the Encounter performance art collective since 2014 and is currently Professor of Philosophy at Woodbury University.

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