Staging the Encounter: the Work of Art as a Stage is a practice-led PhD project that
consists of a thesis and a studio component in sculpture. Through a research question
on the dimension of staging in the practice of sculpture, understood as the spatial
staging that is intrinsic to placing objects in space, I speculate on the effect of this
agency on the encounter of the viewer with the work of art. In this respect staging is
linked to the modality of aesthetic presentation and the emergence of affect in the
viewer.
The thesis investigates different trajectories of thought that reveal a shift in art from
an aesthetic experience keyed on objects to activated scenes of encounter. The
aesthetic event becomes an in-between zone where objecthood, medium and
autonomy are redefined. The first chapter explores a subject produced by an
encounter with a work of art. Two stories of aesthetic embodiment in ancient Greek
drama and Sanskrit performance describe a dynamic co-creation between the viewer
and the work of art; here the aesthetic model dictates its events to theory. The
affective becomings latent in the art encounter restore a connection between the
viewing subject and its faculty of entering the world through the senses.
In the second chapter I explore the implications of staging for contemporary sculpture
and installation. A sculptural performativity across situated objects and emerging
affects maps as lines of force in the space that art stages. The expanded space of
sculpture reverberates social and political frictions through a subversive materiality,
casting objects as agents of an insubordinate order.
The third chapter presents my studio practice, which develops through a series of
sculptures, video works and performances. In these works I set up spaces that act as
rehearsals, scenes that act as platforms for encounters. I also describe case studies of
encounters with works of art that manifest the elements that I discuss throughout the
thesis: a staged encounter that produces an oscillation in the viewer between states of
affect and becoming and critical reflection.