Critical Communities and Aesthetic Practices (Francis_Halsall,_Julia_Jansen,_Sinéad_Murphy)

Chapter 1

Introduction : Critical Communities

and Aesthetic Practices

Francis Halsall , Julia Jansen , and Sinéad Murphy

At the 2007 Venice Biennale, Sophie Calle fi lled the French Pavillon with responses, by more than 100 women, to a personal letter that had originally been addressed to her; an email, to be precise, with which a boyfriend informed her that he would leave her. ‘Take care of yourself,’ the email ends. This phrase became the title for the piece in which each participating woman responded to the email in her individual way and according to her profession. ‘Take Care of Yourself’ raises important questions and it challenges the expectations that are commonly brought to artworks. It also throws and interesting light on this book. Why would an artist make her own personal life public? Is it legitimate to turn the personal into art and to make art personal? Precisely four decades after Roland Barthes pronounced the death of the author, 1 can we allow Calle to be a ‘fi rst-person artist’? 2 Suspicions arise. Is this fi rst-person really her? Is the email authentic? Is the personal that Calle so readily reveals in her work (but not in interviews, we might add) real, or is it just a clever fi ction?

More interesting than answers to these complex questions is the possibility that these answers need not matter. What does matter is that the ‘personal’ origin of Calle’s work enables something to emerge which could not have been without it; the collage of voices, performances and texts exhibited as ‘Take Care of Yourself’ can only be because of the personal; however ‘real’ or not, this may be.

The same is true of this book – with the important difference that we do know of the real existence of the philosopher Tony O’ Connor, in honour of whom it was conceived.

Festschriften such as this, although meant as tributes to especially esteemed colleagues, are often considered of lesser academic value. Articles come together in them, it is said, only arbitrarily; that is, as random selections of texts written by groups of people linked only by their personal connections to the tributee. However, the articles in this book have been arranged to highlight coherent themes which are shared by the contributions and which always informed Tony’s thought and work; these are: the hermeneutics of art, politics and ethics, and friendship. And there are two themes running throughout the book as a whole and contributing to the sense of community amongst all authors. First, all papers are, broadly speaking, phenomenological in outlook and demonstrate how contributions to phenomenology are always applied to particular and practical examples. Second all papers engage in questions of aesthetics broadly conceived. It is for this reason that we have chosen to open this introduction with the example of a work of art. Sophie Calle’s work suggests a different perspective on this very personal book. What matters is not only its real occasion – Tony’s retirement

from University College Cork in Ireland – but what emerges from this occasion. Here, we fi nd a rare openness and experimental spirit among the contributors, which perhaps is only possible in this more personal (although still public and academic) context in which one feels justifi ed in leaving (some) institutional conventions and constraints behind.

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