We tend to think of art as something you look at — a canvas on a wall, an object behind velvet rope, something that holds still while you decide what you think of it. But a tradition in contemporary art has spent the better part of sixty years insisting that this picture is wrong. The artwork isn’t the object. It’s your body moving through the space it creates. In this minibar episode, Bob Vallier draws on his work in phenomenology to make the case that some of the stranger, more provocative, and occasionally illegal-by-contemporary-standards experiments in post-war art are best understood not as aesthetic puzzles to be solved but as invitations to notice something you’re always already doing: being a body in a world that pushes back.

In this episode, Bob references the following thinkers, ideas, texts, and artists:

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
• Edmund Husserl
• Phenomenology (as philosophical method)
• Embodiment / Philosophy of the Body
• Paul Cézanne
• Paul Klee
• Robert Morris (minimalist sculptor)
• Minimalism (visual art)
• Hans Jonas 
• Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” 
• Richard Serra
• Brice Marden
• Abstract Expressionism
• Jackson Pollock
• Orlan and her project The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan
• Michel Foucault (on bodies, power, and normative ideals)
• Chris Burden (performance/endurance art)
• Marina Abramović
• Stelarc (post-human body art) 
• Posthumanism
• Vito Acconci
• Vito Acconci, Seedbed (1972) [link needed]
• Clyfford Still
• Frank Stella
• On Kawara
• Jakob von Uexküll and the concept of Umwelt
• Jacques Taminiaux 
• The Flâneur / promeneur (walking, urban space, embodied movement)