The Live Creature

Anna Craycroft, Esther Ferrer, Adelita Husni-Bey, Allan Kaprow, Teresa Lanceta, Nicolas Malevé, Aimée Zito Lema

Curated by Soledad Gutiérrez

The Live Creature takes its title from the first chapter of John Dewey’s book Art as Experience, published in 1934. Even though at the time, it was received with different enthusiasms, time and renewed approaches to its reading have placed it as a central contribution to art education and the connection of art and everyday life. For Dewey the autonomy of the artistic experience is grounded on the social function of art, promoting a practice that increases our capacity of doing and, understanding the agency of the relations we establish within the conditions of production.

Dewey’s theory could be seen as an attempt to shift the understanding of what is important and characteristic about the art practice from its physical manifestations in the “expressive object” to the process in its entirety, a process whose fundamental element is no longer the material “work of art” but rather the development of an “experience.”

This understanding of experience was later very influential to artists such as Allan Kaprow who pushes Dewey’s philosophy into the experimental context of social and psychological interaction, where outcomes become less predictable. Therein, the given natural and social forms of experience provide the intellectual, linguistic, material, temporal, habitual, performative, ethical, moral and aesthetic framework within which meaning maybe made[1].

Departing from this conceptual frame the exhibition includes projects that explore the connections between art education and art practice, craftsmanship as a way of relating to the world, the body as a subject of transmission and the relevance of the urban processes that surround us. All these become the departure point for the processes of artistic research and production included in the exhibition that become tools for generating a better understanding on the way we live.

[1] Kaprow, Allan. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley. University of California Press, 2003, Los Angeles, p. xviii.

The Live Creature is supported by Acción Cultural Española, AC/E.

The Live Creature is part of Oh ! Pays-Bas, Dutch cultural season in France 2017-2018. 

Enquiries/Press office
Clarisse Schwarb
Clarisse.schwarb@mulhouse.fr

La Kunsthalle Mulhouse is a member of d.c.a.

La Kunsthalle is a cultural establishment of the City of Mulhouse.

With the support from - the Regional Cultural Affairs Office of Alsace / the Ministry of Culture and Communication – Department of Haut-Rhin. – Region Grand Est.