Haapala (2005) - On the Aesthetics of the Everyday

From Inventiopedia

Haapala, Arto (2005) "On the Aesthetics of the Everyday. Familiarity, Strangeness, and the Meaning of Place", in Light, Andrew og Smith, J.M. (eds.)The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, New York: Colombia, University Press, p.39-55

The article’s aim is to put forward an existential account on the phenomenon of the everyday and its aesthetics character (40). … What is the aesthetic relevance of the everyday per se????

The method: He bases his reflections on Heidegger and enters the problems of the everyday through an analysis of the concept of place in its relationship with familiarity. In order to do so, he is doing the opposite to traditional aesthetics: Traditional aesthetics look at what is different in a work of art, at what stands out of the normal. He wants to look at the opposite: the everyday, the normal, the monotonous, the grey colors, and its relationship with PLACE.

He categorizes and describes three meanings of place.

1. – He uses plants as an example of what is to have a sense of place. Then he uses cats ad dogs, animals that can sense (recognize) a place (The chair in which they always choose to rest on). What these places have in common is that they need of a “senser”.

2. - The spirit of the place puts emphasis on the nature of a place, not on the person who is sensing it. It is an atmosphere, an environmental character, something that a city has… for instance. When we say that Paris has a special spirit. What is it? A general answer would be history, cultural tradition.

3. - Sense of place through personal interpretation. Human beings make sense of place through the concepts of strangeness and familiarity.

A) The strangeness that we feel when we encounter something for the 1st time, when we experience the surrounding as unfamiliar. The process of getting acquainted with the senses could be called sensing. We are very sensitive to the looks of things. The visitor in a city looks at things for the first time and thus she sees them fresh. This is what traditionally was the requirement for the aesthetic consideration of the work of art. (Art has been closely related to strangeness. And the aesthetic experience based on that strangeness. )

B) Familiarity is what comes after strangeness. It is the result of making the environment our own. According to our likeness, we make a place our own, we decide to have roots in a place the same way that create bonds with human beings. We place ourselves into environments when we construct connections that are significant to us.

PLACING is the process of HOME BUILDING.

Strangeness is an attack to our home building nature, to our desire for familiarity. Familiarity gives a sense of control over things.

Becoming familiar with a place has to do with individuals INTERPRETING the place. The relationship between a person and a place has an EXISTENTIAL QUALITY due to the individual’s past.

CONCLUSSIONS

The innovativeness of art, the strangeness put on the everyday life has made the Aesthetics of the Everyday be neglected. The familiarity qualities have been overlooked.

The aesthetics of the everyday – based on familiarity- are satisfying. Even though they lack the freshness of object or places being strange and new to us, they have something in their familiarity. They give us pleasure through COMFORTING STABILITY, through the feelings of BEING AT HOME, and doing normal things in a setting that is SAFE. The aesthetics of the everydayness is hiding the extraordinary and disturbing, and feeling homey and in control. The fascination for the absence of the visual.

--M. Elena Perez R. 12:46, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

This article, besides giving a very interesting analysis of the aesthetics of place and the everyday lifeworld, also gives a nice overview of recent theories of place and space - in a footnote.

--Anders Sundnes Løvlie 08:40, 22 October 2008 (UTC)