Artfulness

Erin Manning (Concordia University)

Through a development of the concepts of the art of time and the art of participation, this paper explores the relationship of intuition and sympathy in Bergson’s work to ask how a concept of artfulness might be conceived. Artfulness is here defined as the force of the event of art, a force that is more than human.

Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the director of the Sense Lab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. In her art practice she works between painting, dance, fabric and sculpture (http://www.erinmovement.com). Current iterations of her artwork explore emergent collectivities through participatory textiles. Her project Stitching Time will be presented at the 2012 Sydney Biennale and The Knots of Time will open the new Flax Museum in Kortrijk, Belgium in 2014. Her writing addresses movement, art, experience and the political through the prism of process philosophy, with recent work developing a notion of autistic perception and the more-than human. Publications include Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007) and Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity in Canada (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003). Her forthcoming manuscript, Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance will be published by Duke University Press in 2012 as will her forthcoming co-written manuscript (with Brian Massumi), Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minnesota UP).