Abstract

With reference to a standard work on embodied cognition – The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson und Eleanor Rosch – in this article I theorize art reception that connects reflexive processes with concrete perceptual experiences as embodied art reflection. Analogously to Varela et al’s citation of meditation practice as a transformation of immediate experience into an open, embodied reflection, one can also understand focussed awareness of experience in reflected, perceptually-oriented reception of art as an open, embodied mode of access. The particular educational potential of art as a medium and object of knowledge and cognition lies moreover above all in its physical power of making-present, which exercises its particular effect in the concrete experience of the artwork. Against the background of a phenomenological perspective on learning, it is especially disruptive moments which are able to form perception and thought anew. For a pedagogical context above all, the schooling of perception and attention practised in art has particular relevance in relation to lived experience, opening new horizons. To show the potential of embodied art reflection through an example from the field of object art, my theoretical discussion opens out into a specific consideration of an artwork.