Picking up of the thoughts that Richard Newscomb has expressed about
multisensory experience and the fact that we perceive as individuals and not
just as brain; It seems to me that most of the discussion has focused on the
brain and we dismiss that as individuals within given cultures and by the
way we have been socially inculcated we make use of our senses for certain
purposes and in specific ways. And what I am suggested is that all the
different information that we receive via all our five senses are all
potential of knowledge.
This knowledge or sensory episteme has been referred as the sensory
framework which has been provided to use as set of habits, ways of behaving,
looking, smelling, hearing within a socio cultural context to make a sense
of our world as humans and to interface with our environment. A good
example is with the immense changes of modernity in urbanization and worked
(factories) it also entailed profound changes in the sensory landscape and
the use of senses by the use sanitization campaigns adopting olfactory
intolerance and the rationalized imperatives of industry which reduced the
body of the worker to the most utilataritarian of gestures. Rescuing the
body and the senses from instrumentalization became a significant thematic
among the generation of artists of the 60¹s.
Lydia Clark¹s (1967) Sensorial Masks were performative pieces of clothing
that sought to reinvigorate and counter act the anomic blandness of modern
life. Filled with herbs, spices and other fragrant substances they served as
means to rediscover the vivid world of sensation and exchanges that binds
together all senses. These sensory hoods engaged the body directly
attempting to recalibrate the sensory orders thus recovering fullness of
experience. Such a task was not merely an exercise of hedonism for it also
was informed by questioning the social habits and political decisions that
crated the monotony of modern life. As for the avant garde artists earlier
in the century rediscovering the energy of the senses and unblocking their
enjoyment promoted an activist, liberating and critical potential that
parallel the rethinking of numerous assumptions of everyday life and the
way we make art.
One of the goals in my artworks is to create sites of knowledge production.
And to my opinion the sensing scientific training which manifests itself on
approximation constitutes knowledge only by approximation a ³short hand² to
the real. To get to the point I like finish with Cocteau¹s caution that to
be able to think ,to see, to hear, to smell, to touch one must first feel.
Jenny Marketou
www.jennymarketou.com
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