Play and Fictionality: From Representation to Performance

Contemporary aesthetic research, on the one hand, has focused on exploring the qualities, conditions, and specific structures of aesthetic play and artistic fictionality, paying attention to the ontological dimension and normative structure of aesthetic experience and artistic constructs. This approach is based on what can be termed the “paradigm of representation”. Here, art is understood as a re-presentation of reality and history on a distinct ontological plane (de-realized and de-historicized). On the other hand, also in response to developments in contemporary artistic practices, theoretical proposals have emerged which have conceived notions of play and fiction that extend beyond the representational paradigm and emphasize the performative nature of art and aesthetic experience. In this view, art is understood as an action on reality, and history, thus occupying the same ontological plane.