Dog Aesthetics

John Dewey’s (1859-1952) organic aesthetics foregrounds the beyond human sensory attention of dogs. Taking modernism as a moniker for human-nature dualism this chapter returns to Dewey’s aesthetics to explore how dogs can help us overcome modernism’s folly of separation and its avatars in art theory and practice. It contributes to Latour’s call for re-arranging modernism by imagining how being dog-sensory might support practice research. This imagining breeds Dewey’s dogs with my own familiar and settles their whelp within and beyond the fictional village of Midwich as it is first imagined in John Wyndham’s sci-fi novel.

The chapter’s theoretical fictioning builds from Dewey’s differentiation of practice/s: as being at the human scale where people are interacting with each other and other things; and beyond the human scale where people are transacting as part of their environing conditions where practice takes place in organic processual becoming. Its personal-playful construction makes three contributions: (1) scrutinising popular relational paradigms of art through a Deweyan lens of practice; (2) proposing ‘dog aesthetics’ as a Deweyan paradigm for breeding more than human practice/s for re-imagining modernity; (3) and advocating for the importance of art’s own internal knowledge production.