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Art as Pleasure
speaking broadly to human experience. Each of her figures are headless and signifies a
Luca Massimo Barbero curated that Abakanowicz said The kind of people I'm
dealing with in my work are people in general because they speak of the human
condition in general and the perennial conflict between instinct and intellect. At the
same time her work expresses the cruelty perpetrated by human beings on other
human beings over the centuries. In a group individuals tend to lose their sense of
responsibility and with it their dignity. I wanted to confront man himself, with his solitude
before Christ said that it is much easier for a leader to convince a crowd than an
aluminum, bronze and iron. Headless, shell-like, often only with legs carrying the
meaningful trunk, or with arms hanging like unnecessary tools, or with hands strong and
In The Abakans and the feminist revolution by Agata Jakubowska, she mentioned
that Abakanowicz belonged to a group of female artists working from vastly different
cultural referents [that] have been empowered by ideas of earth, mother, and Amazon
With this statements, we can say that her artworks fall under the philosophy of
David Hume about Art as Pleasure: of taste and tragedy. Her artworks are non-
canonical but can provoke our thoughts. In fall below the tragedy category which Hume
described in his essays. Abakanowiczs artworks portray the deep expressions of her
Art as Beauty
Abakanowiczs arts are successful in portraying and emotions. Her art explains the
subjective beauty of nature where she focuses on the meaning of her art. The beauty in
Magdalena Abakanowiczs art is the astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle
between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind. Abakanowicz
has become best known for her unique treatment of the human figure, often
headless and modeled in found burlap or cast in bronze, representing our capacity to
Her artwork has different individuality, with its own expression and the details of the
artwork. The beauty within her art is the rendition, she makes art about the countless.
Those countless people and animals are so easily grouped together in life. She also
one of the greatest artists and one that the most appreciated for the depth of her
astonishing creations.
Her figures are beautiful, but not beautiful in a way that we would generally classify
Gadamer and George Dickie. Gadamer states that an art is formed with what the art
objectively informs our subjective awareness of an art. An art that is considered being
called a work of art has a power to affect us immediately. Gadamer also explains art as
a work of experience through time, in which art is able to interpret the possible
meanings held within the experience of a work, and by drawing on them to bring that
With the aforementioned statements from the first part of this paper,
Abakanowicz put her experiences to her works. And through that, they can send a deep
George Dickie later argued against both disinterest and distance in a famous
1964 paper, The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude. He argued that we should be able to
enjoy all objects of awareness, whether pure aesthetic or moral. In fact, he thought the
term aesthetic could be used in all cases, rejecting the idea that there was some
authorized way of using the word just to apply to surface or formal features the
artwork as a thing in itself. As a result, Dickie concluded that the aesthetic attitude,
when properly understood, reduced to just close attention to whatever holds ones mind
in an artwork, against the tradition which believed it had a certain psychological quality,
Abakanowicz rejects all beauty, all decoration and all camouflage. She tears
them off, layer after layer, as if she wanted to tear off layers of skin. Only what's
This statement can support the application of Dickies philosophy about art as
beauty.
References:
http://www.beck-eggeling.de/en/ausstellungen/magdalena-abakanowicz-crowd-
and-individual/
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/global-
contemporary/a/abakanowicz-androgyne
http://culture.pl/en/work/the-crowds-magdalena-abakanowicz
https://www.academia.edu/7927512/Magdalena_Abakanowiczs_Abakans_and_t
he_Feminist_Revolution
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer-aesthetics/
http://www.iep.utm.edu/aestheti/