Aesthetics of the Oppressed

This course is part aesthetics, so I have begun reading Boal's Aesthetics of the Oppressed. There is a lot in here, even with it being such a short book. I will be working my way through it slowly. I can tell right off the bat that it's very theological. Here are some initial thoughts from the initial chapter "A Theoretical Foundation."

"Art is love" (Boal, 19). Boal sees art and love as inseparably linked. The two are not different. "Love... is an aesthetic experience" by which one both perceives the "unicity" of the other and by which the same one makes/constructs the other" (Boal, 19). Boal says, "In loving, we love not only the person who concretely exists, but the projections we make [on that person]" (Boal, 19). If love is an integral part of faith and beauty is an integral part of faith, then art is an integral part of faith. Faith, then, constructs something and faith appreciates (or should appreciate) unicity.

Boal likes music. More specifically, Boal likes European music. Boal's illustrations frequently feature Mozart and Wagner, as the Marxist work done by Theatre of the Oppressed relied on Aristotle and Hegel. What are the implications for decolonial thought and praxis? If Boal's praxis acts in a truly liberative manner, returning agency to the historically marginalized, do the streams which fed into this work matter?

"Art is a special form of knowledge - subjective, sensory, not scientific" (Boal, 20). Art is an epistemology. 

Who is the artist? "Art rediscovers and reinvents reality from a singular perspective: that of the artist, who is unique, as is his relationship with the real, and his way of seeing and feeling - from which is born the Work of Art, capable of recreating, in each of us, the same path of the artist" (Boal, 20). This seems to place the artist as sovereign over their work. What does this have to do with de-hierarchicalized theatre? What is the place of the audience? Here, Boal suggests that art constructs an audience to discover just what the artist discovered.

Is this the case? My reader response sensibilities that the artist is not sovereign over their own work. Furthermore, the artist is not publishing a process (as is Theatre of the Oppressed) but a product. How can an audience even hope to take the same "path of the artist" without a published account of the path (Boal, 20)? I tend toward the juxtaposition of Gordon Lathrop in seeing the art as set beside an audience who then make something of the situation. The audience, in some way, becomes an artist, regardless of whether the original artist (OP, in the language of meme culture) is present. The OP can try to regulate a certain meaning, but even that end can be unobtainable.

I recognize, given Boal's ability to draw everything together later in the book, that these questions may be anticipated. But I blog as one working to remember their own journey through this work.