Entertaining the environment: towards an ethics of art events

Erin Manning’s concept of an art that ‘entertains the environment’, proposes a ‘minor’ practice that might be capable of provoking reconnection with a wide field of non-subjective forces. Rather than a concentration on a replicating of human/object hierarchies, it implies a focus on how various assemblages of human and nonhuman, concrete and abstract, virtual and actual forces have the potential to be realigned through the artistic process. Drawing on recent writing and artwork by Manning, this essay will propose the potential of such a shift in focus in the art event as a tactical approach towards development of a new conception of a political art. This might be seen as an ecological approach to art, which reconnects us with lively worlds and non-human agencies. This essay also explores the entertainment of the environment through an examination of Lygia Clark’s propositional art work 'Caminhando' (1963), concentrating on the transductive potential of the opening of the body to a wider field of distributed agency to produce a sensation of being ‘always more than’ a subject.