Philosophers’ Café - That Thinking Feeling: Aesthetics of Immanence

Join the Vancouver Art Gallery on the first Thursday of every month for a three part series considering the traditions of aesthetic philosophies.

This winter the Philosophers’ Café develops a number of propositions concerning the uses of aesthetic categories, and the challenges that the advent of photography and film presented to conventional understandings of aesthetics. Working with the exhibitions TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945, and Kutlug Ataman:Paradise and Küba, as points of departure and arrival, the Cafés will also propose a contemporary aesthetics equal to existence in the twenty-first century.

Thursday, February 7 at 7pm
at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 4East
Looking, seeing, showing and knowing.

The February Café will look back to the advent of photography in the middle of the nineteenth century and draw connections across writing, photography, aesthetics, and the constitution of subjectivities.

Joy James teaches at the Emily Carr Institute working in the areas of critical and cultural theory and aesthetics. She is primarily interested in cultural production located at the interstices of art, science, and technology, and the impact of this work on an individual’s, a group’s, or a population’s sense of possibility and potentiality.

Readings: (copies are also available on our website at www.vanartgallery.bc.ca)
· Benjamin, Walter. “A Short History of Photography” (1931), Alan Trachtenberg (ed.), Classic Essays on Photography; New Haven, Conn: Leete's Islands Books , 1980: pp.200-216.
· Foucault, Michel. "Self Writing," Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley, et al., New York: New Press, 1997: pp. 207-222.

The Vancouver Art Gallery is an ongoing partner with the Philosophers’ Café founders, Simon Fraser University’s Continuing Education.