La joyería contemporánea como arte. Un estudio filosófico

Abstract

The opening process that started with the Enlightenment opened many roads for freedom and democracy to develop. In the stele of Descartes, Kant introduced the idea of an individual able to think with his own mind and to judge by his own taste. Taste as a form of reasoning and freedom of choice will, however, open other unforeseen paths that do not have anything to do with art or aesthetics but rather with types of jewellery like I will focus. Kant didn’t appreciate ornaments of any sort. Yet I must add the development add the modern mechanical arts to his landscape. Together with the freedom to choose after one’s individual taste, the development of modern mechanical arts also made it possible to gradually redirect jewellery towards democratic directions. Already in Kant’s time, and progressively during the nineteenth and twentieth century, jewellery could be freely chosen, intertwined with fashions and other culturally meaningful fields. On the other hand, since the beginning of twentieth century, many artists have created jewellery, willing to break traditional terroirs of art. In the middle of the twentieth century, embedded in a specific historical context, a different type of jewellery arises, independent from fashion jewellery and artist jewellery. This one corresponds to contemporary jewellery and to selfconscious individuals who created a matrix of symbolic writing and critical languages that follow other paths. Favoured by educational models that have evolved, it implicitly proposes to be considered philosophically as a shift in direction for art. This latter type of jewellery gives continuity to a new jewellery, a vanguard born in the sixties, when the opening of art also reached many areas of social and cultural life. A number of jewellers think jewellery as a possible carrier of free symbolic meanings, free from rules or subjections, like art is. They reconfigure and enlarge forms. They don’t work to adorn the body, to embellish or aestheticize it. They symbolically relate the body or argue about the body as they argue about other issues of life and the world depending on how those may touch their sensitivity. They propose reflexive aesthetic experiences. Contemporary jewellery is a reflexive art. This is my thesis. I interpret the logic of contemporary jewellery as a free aesthetic discourse that crossbreeds art and crafts. Intentions to communicate through creative discourses excel, bringing reasoning and doing together, like a game opposed to forms of power. Through emancipated attitudes, in between politics in tension or consensus and dissent, and ways to share the sensitive on a perceptual platform, constituted as a discursive and learning arena. This arena is a world of reasons. In it, we can also find crossbreeding and anti-totalitarian attitudes. These jewellers want and, simultaneously, do not want, to be included in processes common to the traditional territory of art. Contemporary jewellery does not imitate other forms of art. It has its own intentions and pursues present perspectives. It distinguishes itself from other forms of art for it creates tangible metaphors and sometimes it is wearable. This PhD thesis sets itself out as a philosophy of contemporary jewellery. I analyse it as a world of reasons that are historically made possible. I propose a specific identification regime that articulates ways of thinking and doing. I distinguish it from other forms of art and other things. I underline ways of creating and communicating symbolically, that lead to experiences that can be reasoning and tangible processes. Through a hermeneutic analysis, I intend to lay out to a horizontal critic of contemporary jewellery.

Date of Award	28 Nov 2014
Original language	Spanish
Supervisor	Gerard Vilar Roca (Director)