NETTOYÉ LE 24 JUIN 2017
Vous consultez actuellement les archives pour le thème Varia-art.
http://ubu.com/film/nameth_velvet.html
« La série de performances multimédia organisées par Andy Warhol entre 1966 et 1967 au cours desquelles Jonas Mekas projettera son film du même nom sur le corps des performers. »
Ubuweb :
Title: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable with The Velvet Underground
Director: Ronald Nameth
Show Co-ordinator: Paul Morrisey
Lights: Dan Williams
Sound: David Faison
Music: The Velvet Underground & Nico, I’ll Be Your Mirror and European Son from The Velvet Underground & Nico LP and It Was a Pleasure Then from Nico’s Chelsea Girl LP, and two live songs from the Exploding Plastic Inevitable at Poor Richard’s, 1363 No. Sedgwick, Chicago, 1966/06/23, Heroin [5:14] and Venus In Furs [3:24]. That show was without Lou Reed who was at New York’s Beth Israel Hospital for hepatitis, and without Nico who took off for Ibiza at the beginning of June. John Cale on lead vocals and keyboards, drums, Sterling Morrison on guitar, Maureen Tucker on bass, and Angus MacLise was on drums.
Running Time: 22 minutes (long version)/12 minutes (short version)
Release Date: 1966-08-00 [US]
Cast: The Velvet Underground & Nico: John Cale (vocals, organ), Sterling Morrison (rhythm guitar), Maureen Tucker (bass guitar), Angus McLise (drums)
Gerard Malanga: Dancer
Ingrid Superstar: Dancer
Susan Pile
Edward Walsh
Note: An alternate version of this film was broadcasted on French TV channel Canal + on 1990-08-26. That version is edited to 12 minutes and the soundtrack is different: Venus In Furs [3:57] and Heroin [3:19] are not the versions sung by John Cale but those from the Columbus Valleydale Ballroom 1966-11-04 tape. Credits titles are also different (John Cale’s name appears correctly spelled even though it was mispelled as ‘John Cahill’ in the 22-min version). It was this shortened version which was shown at the Fondation Cartier exhibition in Jouy-En-Josas on 1990-06-15 and is available on the Re:Voir VHS.
Andy Warhol’s hellish sensorium, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, was, while it lasted, the most unique and effective discotheque environment prior to the Fillmore/Electric Circus era, and it is safe to say that the EPI has never been equaled. Similarly, Ronald Nameth’s cinematic homage to the EPI stands as a parangon of excellence in the kinetic rock-show ganre. Nameth, a colleague of John Cage in several mixed-media environments at the University of Illinois, managed to transform his film into something far more than a mere record of an event. Like Warhol’s show, Nameth’s EPI is an experience, not an idea.
In fact, the ethos of the entire pop life-style seems to be synthesized in Nameth’s dazzling kinaethetic masterpiece. Here, form and content are virtually synonymous, and there is no misunderstanding what we see. It’s as though the film itself has exploded and reassembled in a jumble of shards and prisms. Gerard malanga and Ingrid Superstar dance frenetically to the music of the Velvet Underground (Heroin, European Son, and a quasi-East Indian composition), while their ghost images writhe in Warhol’s Vinyl projected on a screen behind. There’s a spectacular sense of frantic uncontrollable energy, communicated almost entirely by Nameth’s exquisite manipulation of the medium.
EPI was photographed on color and black-and-white stock during one week of performances by Warhol’s troupe. Because the environment was dark, and because of the flash-cycle of the strobe lights, Nameth shot at eight frames per second and printed the footage at the regular twenty-four fps. In addition he developed a mathematical curve for repeated frames and superimpositions, so that the result is an eerie world of semi-slow motion agaisnt an aural background of incredible frenzy. Colors were superimposed over black-and-white negatives and vice-versa. An extraordinary off-color grainy effect resulted from pushing the ASA rating of his color stock; thus the images often seem to lose their cohesiveness as though wrenched apart by the sheer force of the environment.
Watching the film is like dancing in a strobe room: time stops, motion retards, the body seems separate from the mind. The screen bleeds onto the wall, the seats. Flak bursts of fiery explode with slow fury. Staccato strobe guns stitch galaxies of silverfish over slow-motion, stop-motion close-ups of the dancers’ dazed ecstatic faces. Nameth does with cinema what the Beatles do with music: his film is dense, compact, yet somehow fluid and light. It is extremely heavy, extremely fast, yet airy and poetic, amosaic, a tapestry, a mandala that sucks you into its whirling maelstrom.
The most striking aspect of Nameth’s work is the use of the freeze-frame to generate a sense of timelessness. Stop-motion is literaly the death of the image: we are instantly cut-off from the illusion of cinematic life — the immediacy of motion — and the image suddenly is relegated to the motionless past, leaving in its place a pervading aurea of melancholy. The final shots of Gerad Malanga tossing his head in slow motion and freezing in several positions create a ghostlike atmosphere, a timeless and ethereal mood that lingers and haunts long after the images fade. Using essentially graphic materials, Nameth rises above a mere graphic exercise: he makes kinetic empathy a new kind of poetry.
RESOURCES:
The Velvet Underground / John Cale in Aspen No. 3
Dans Pourparlers,
Reprise de l’article « Sur la philosophie », Magazine littéraire, n° 257, septembre 1988, entretien avec Raymond Bellour et François Ewald, page 204
« Il y a un rapport privilégié de la philosophie avec la neurologie, on le voit chez les associationnistes, chez Schopenhauer ou Bergson. Ce qui nous inspire aujourd’hui, ce ne sont pas les ordinateurs, c’est la microbiologie du cerveau: celui-ci se présente comme un rhizome, de l’herbe plutôt qu’un arbre, « an incertain system », avec des mécanismes probabilitaires, semi-aléatoires, quantiques. Ce n’est pas que nous pensions d’après la connaissance que nous avons du cerveau, mais toute nouvelle pensée trace à vif dans le cerveau des sillons inconnus, elle le tord, le plisse ou le fend. Miracle de Michaux à cet égard. De nouvelles connexions, de nouveaux frayages, de nouvelles synapses, c’est ce que la philosophie mobilise en créant des concepts, mais c’est aussi toute une image dont la biologie du cerveau découvre avec ses moyens propres la ressemblance matérielle objective ou le matériau de puissance.
Ce qui m’a intéressé dans le cinéma, c’est que l’écran puisse y être un cerveau, comme dans le cinéma de Resnais, ou de Syberberg. Le cinéma ne procède pas seulement avec des enchaînements par coupures rationnelles, mais avec des réenchaînements sur coupures irrationnelles : ce n’est pas la même image de la pensée. Ce qu’il y avait d’intéressant dans les clips au début, c’était l’impression que certains donnaient d’opérer par ces connexions et hiatus qui n’étaient plus ceux de la veille, mais pas non plus ceux du rêve ni même du cauchemar. Un instant, ils ont frôlé quelque chose qui était de la pensée. C’est tout ce que je veux dire : une image secrète de la pensée inspire par ses développements, bifurcations et mutations la nécessité toujours de créer des nouveaux concepts, non pas en fonction d’un déterminisme externe, mais en fonction d’un devenir qui emporte les problèmes eux-mêmes. »
p. 30, ed Mamco, 2013
« »Je peins comme si je peignais un mur » , disait déjà Floquet au début de sa carrière – on s’en souvient. L’affirmation désignait aussi l’architecture comme paradigme possible d’une peinture imposant sa présence physique dans l’espace avec la même évidence que le bâti: non pas tant peindre un mur que construire ce mur, édifier devant le regard une paroi opaque qui redouble celle du mur, ou qui s’y identifie. Floquet apprécie en effet dans l’architecture – cet art beaucoup moins ambigu et plus empirique que la peinture – sa capacité à faire intrusion, à se faire admettre au prix éventuel d’une certaine brutalisation de son environnement direct. Le mur de peinture édifié par l’artiste cherche de même à imposer l’indépassable présence physique du tableau. Par la peinture imposer le tableau dans l’espace réel comme l’architecture y impose le mur, sans craindre même d’y faire violence: que le tableau fasse obstacle, que l’on ne puisse s’y dérober. Cette affirmation s’accompagne en outre d’une stratégie consistant à environner l’œuvre d’une certaine qualité de silence, plutôt que de la construire à travers le discours. « Après l’abandon de toute expressivité, le silence théorique permet peut-être, pour une fois encore, de laisser voir la peinture », écrit Christian Besson dès la fin des années 1980, alors qu’il est l’un des tout premiers à relever ce « grand silence » de la peinture de Floquet. Cette position auto-suffisante et littéraliste est bien celle que promouvaient, après Frank Stella, les mentors de Floquet au milieu des années 1980, lorsque Armleder déclarait qu’avant tout « ce qui s’impose à nous, c’est une peinture et sa démonstration formelle » et que Mosset renchérissait : « On peut toujours dire ceci ou cela, mais le travail c’est quelque chose qui se regarde, qui se voit et c’est ce que c’est. » Ce grand mutisme qui laisse voir la peinture dans la seule apparence visuelle est un indice supplémentaire de l’appartenance de Floquet, par-delà des jeux conceptuels du néo-géo, à une tradition de l’abstraction où l’on s’est toujours fait la même haute idée du tableau, comme lieu à la fois de concentration et d’engagement d’une subjectivité sans pathos, sans geste déplacé, presque distante. « Je peins comme si je peignais un mur »: un mur de silence, donc. »
Le texte intégral et des images sur le site http://www.bernardceysson.com/fr-artiste-christian-floquet.html
Extrait de Collage et montage au théâtre et dans les autres arts durant les années vingt
de Denis Bablet
http://www.paul-claudel.net/oeuvre/resume/le-livre-de-christophe-colomb-resume
« Le recours au cinéma, doublant et illustrant parfois sur la toile du fond les paroles et l’action des personnages, permet de représenter ou de suggérer sur l’écran les événements ou les sentiments évoqués sur la scène : ainsi, dans la première partie, le spectacle du globe terrestre sur lequel plane une colombe figurant l’Esprit de Dieu (tableau 3), le souvenir de la prise de Grenade au cours de la prière de la Reine Isabelle (tableau 14), les visions de Christophe Colomb rêvant aux aventures de Marco Polo (tableau 10) ou tenaillé par le remords de ses exactions, justifiées par la découverte d’un monde (deuxième partie, tableau 4). »
http://mediation.centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ENS-Lettre_image/index.html
Raqs Media Collective: It is possible because it is possible
Forensic Architecture: Forensis
September 26–November 1 2015
Opening: September 26, 17h
Fundación Proa
Av. Pedro de Mendoza 1929
Buenos Aires
Argentina
Raqs Media Collective and Forensis reflect widely on notions of the « present »; both groups are interested in using different perspectives to bring awareness to current problems encompassing globalization, cultural differences associated with the economy, global politics, and contemporary subjectivity. The diversity of new artistic practices widens the spectrum of how we think about art.
What does it mean to create images today, and how does history take charge of these images’ meaning in their various forms of production? In what form can art update the tensions that are produced by the « real » in our time? Can an exhibition transform itself into a forum for debate and participation? Can cultural institutions succeed in intervening in contemporary reality? In these two separately conceived exhibitions, Proa presents these questions as a means of strengthening interest in the aesthetic and political processes that accompany artistic research.
For the multidisciplinary group Forensic Architecture, aesthetic work cannot be separated from research, at once generating opposing discussions and politics regarding space, urban fabric, and the means to inhabit them. Making use of satellite maps, photographs, videos, and personal and public archives, they pose unresolved questions for our time. Forensis formulates these discussions to challenge the viewer and offer an active glimpse into cultural and geopolitical conflicts through an aesthetic lens.
Raqs Media Collective analyzes the effects of global capitalism, interrogating the personal and social spheres in which the contemporary unfolds. Raqs proposes a form of imagining in which both the linear organization of the world and the historical absurdity that it signifies are viewed, paradoxically, from the same perspective. The works of Raqs are an invitation to realize, in the face of the prospect of a stable reality, the possibility of imagining new utopian configurations or possibilities.
Both shows are accompanied by parallel series of activities, through which Fundación Proa sets out to revitalize discussions about the « present. »
Raqs Media Collective
http://proa.org/eng/exhibition-raqs-media-collective-textos.php
– Curatorial Text
– Dialogue between Ferran Barenblit (FB) and Cuauhtémoc Medina (CM)
– Raqs Media Collective Texts (IT’S WRITTEN BECAUSE IT’S WRITTEN )*
Curatorial Text
Ferran Barenblit – Cuauhtémoc Medina
It’s possible because it’s possible brings together a series of pieces by Raqs Media Collective, an artistic group created in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi (1966), Monica Narula (1969) and Shudd- habrata Sengupta (1968). Located in New Dehli, Raqs Media Collective, is a thinking laboratory that uses the aesthetic as a starting point for social and political reflection. At present, the Raqs collective carries out installations and performances, as well as editorial, curatorial and eduational projects through different approaches such as sociology, geography, mathematics, industrial design or urbanism. The origin of its name refers both to the word used in Persian, Arabic and Urdu to define a state of meditation, and to the acronym in English «Rarely Asked Questions», a wordplay with the better-known FAQs «Frequently Asked Questions»- that we find on so many websites.
«It’s possible because it’s possible» is an irrefutable statement against a defeatist determinism. This title becomes an appeal or a sort of manifest. Contrary to the non-determination of I would prefer not to expressed by Melville in his work Bartleby the scrivener, «It’s possible because it’s possible» is a categorical, almost imperative, statement on the possibility of going from potential to action. For the Raqs collective, possible and probable are distant concepts: that which is imagined might happen, because, in fact, it is already happening once stated. A possibility that breaks away from many of the certainties we generally accept unthinkingly and which lead us along the labyrinth of hegemonic thinking. In line with this, the exhibition analyses the work of Raqs Media Collective as one of the possibilities of practice, criticism and invention, while also constituting a live refutation of a certain determinism that we appear to be set on. This «possibility» also becomes a call to action against the apparent obligation to accept impositions, whether resignedly or not.
In Raqs Media Collective there is a will to extend the universe of discourse by creating tools through imagination and speculation in order to create new ways of thinking and experiencing. Each work, each allegory, each reflection and each image and artefact created by Raqs represents an impulse that is currently necessary: to prevent criticism from being confused with complaints and impotence, to challenge the logic that is perceived and prevails in the world as if predestined, in spite of being closed and worn out, just because we live in an apparently trium- phant system.
One of the most prominent axes of the exhibition is the question of time, or in other words, how the sequence of events is organised and the systematic regularisation between work, rest and leisure in modern-day society. In capitalism, time is a fundamental notion, as it is possibly the only exchangeable currency with a sure value. A value that is directly related to our condition as mortals, meaning therefore, that it is a finite asset.
In the work of Raqs, time is the battlefield that takes place in the body of each worker, as their time is divided between work and leisure, on consuming stimulants such as coffee or tea to sur- vive or adapt to the production machine.
Raqs sees reality as a constant field of learning, open to both the FAQs –frequently asked ques- tions-, and the less comfortable RAQs –rarely asked questions-. In its piece Firm of RAQS and FAQS, 2014, the artists installed an information desk at which the public could ask either ques- tion type. In Ask the person who sits next to you, 2012 they even went so far as to do without the middleman. This is perhaps the most ambitious objective that Raqs Collective Media pursues: for each one of us not just to be receivers, but also to become generators and re-distributors of meaning.
Cosmopolitan Patience
Dialogue between Ferran Barenblit (FB) and Cuauhtémoc Medina (CM)
CM: It’s possible because it’s possible… It’s not entirely wrong to start the conversation by commenting on one of the project’s conclusions: the title. I don’t think it would be absurd to say that, in general, establishing an exhibition’s name is like getting one of its first results, even when the title comes at the beginning, which was not the case for us. One hears “It’s possible because it’s possible” and knows oneself to be faced with an appeal, a sort of manifestational act. That title encodes an understanding of Raqs’s work and offers it as an affirmation of the possibilities of practice, critique and invention as a living refutation of determinism. In each work, in each allegory, in each reflection, and in each image that Raqs has created, there is an impulse that, today, is otherwise as rare and necessary as fresh water: to keep critique from getting confused with complaint or impotence, to challenge the logic that perceives the world and operates in it as though it were predestined, closed and spent, subsumed and domesticated, just because we are living under globally triumphant capitalism. If one reads Raqs’s texts and explores their images and artifacts, if one accepts the pedagogical and active acts in which they involve us as participant observers, what one perceives, before any particular ideas, is an extraordinary plea for the complexity and plurality of the realities that we are living, both through the energies of the living and for the echoes of the dead, and the intensity that inhabits the battle that occurs between social systems, our desires and bodies, history, the other beings on the planet, words and images. I know few artists, thinkers, or cultural agents who have the ability to share, with real camaraderie, the decisive sensation of feeling the world as abundance and enigma.
FB: The coincidence in thinking of the importance of working with Raqs originated in another project from 2010 in which you were involved, through El Espectro Rojo, and which was also seen on both sides of the Atlantic: Critical Fetishes: Residues of General Economy. A complex exhibition, in which the notion of the fetish was reprised as a concept wherein Enlightenment thought and colonialism come together, reinforced by their relationship with the mechanisms of desire, and, in turn, actualized in a moment of unstoppable, object-producing industrial expansion. The exhibition combated the foundations of that thought by showing works and processes that act at the margins of efficiency and the search for profit, or that establish dissident economic and symbolic systems. It included a work by Raqs, the Communist Latento (2007), which was one of the nodes of the exhibition: poetic ambiguity passing through one of many possible futures. “It is not desirable that the future be captive to the present,” they said at the time. That possibility reappears now in this title: a possibility that breaks much of the normalcy that we habitually and uncritically take for granted, and which leads us through the labyrinth of singular thought. “It’s possible because it’s possible” is an antidote against the “There is no alternative” ignited by Margaret Thatcher, which has since continued to spur on the acceptance of impositions, resignedly or otherwise. “It’s just plain common sense,” the possessors of the truth insist. This title encloses Raqs’s ambition to broaden the universe of discourse, to celebrate its multidimensional condition, not only by exploring pathways, but also by generating tools through imagination and speculation to make new ones appear. This is why I am so fond of their meticulous indetermination, their definition of a broad field of action, where individual and collective emotional and political elements interbreed. To Raqs’s way of thinking, possible and probable are distant concepts: I think it matters quite little if that which is imagined comes to pass, because, in fact, it is already happening upon being enunciated. Perhaps that is why one of the ideas present in this exhibition is that of time, a notion that is absolutely fundamental to capitalism, possibly the only convertible currency with a secure value.
CM: What’s specific about the problem of time in Raqs’ work, which is certainly one of the most prominent thrusts of the show, is that it is much more than a theme: it is the referent for a multitude of battles that are liberated from a cosmological and geological plane, like that of the interrogation of our interaction with history and histories, under the field of class struggle that is produced in the body of each worker and subject of modernity by ingesting stimulants like coffee or tea, or in the resistance or adaptation to the productive machine. The way, for example, that the clocks in Now, Elsewhere (Escapement) (2009-2014), which, with this show, Raqs has produced in Spanish, explore a division of the day into hours of affect and desire, wanting to suspend the subordination of our organic and emotional life to a time segmented into mechanistic and abstract measures. Among the many threads of memory and living theorization involved in their film essay The Capital of Accumulation (2010) is the preoccupation with the subsumption of the living in the binomial of species and spaces, and of history and living experience, under the continual violence of capitalism’s instrumentalization. Beyond posing the need for a repeated visitation to the past of revolutionary history, and a familiarity with its ghosts, what the film seeks to posit is confidence in the solidarity between the resistance of the forces of the living in nature, and living resistance in politics and history, a mirroring that is probably marked by the slogan of another piece: Revoltage (2010). For Raqs, time is not, for critical reasons, an abstract and therefore innocuous dimension, but rather one of the main social battlefields, a theater of class struggle at the microscopic level just as in planetary terms. Beyond the decisiveness of the perspective of time in relation to struggles around the extension and intensity of the working day, time appears as the principal object of political appropriation, of control of the living over the dead. Hence the continuous oscillation between historical times in Raqs’s work, in whatever medium: one of their tasks is to listen and to bear witness to the diagram of forces where the accumulation of value, which effects its operations in nanoseconds, is disputed along with the duration of the unfolding and sedimentation of species, ways of life and forms of sensibility over the world, which has a venerable temporality and which, like the multiple that Raqs has created as a kind of plastic block, poses a requisite that is so apparently difficult today, that of the condition of Waiting (2014).
Certainly, one of the motifs that make Raqs into a decisive referent for us is in that meditation, at once poetic, political and ethical, on the collision and vibration of the dimensions of temporality.
FB: The first thing that comes to mind when I think about exhibitions is, precisely, their relationship to time. The exhibition is a concept inherited from modernity, and which continues to be the principal form of contact between art and public. In fact, all of art’s attempts, starting with the avant- gardes, to destabilize it and bring it to crisis have ended up, paradoxically, getting presented in exhibitions: just like the museum institution, the exhibition institution has thematized their dissent. And there’s time as a key factor. The invention of the cinema arrived at the moment when modernity had been extended throughout the entirety of the West, with its demand for punctuality, for guidelines. Spectators all had to sit down at the same time in the theater and to know when they would be leaving, which was compatible with the economic system’s demand that all workers arrive punctually to their stations. (On top of that, it would also manage to make everyone feel the same thing at the same time, to make them laugh and cry in unison, but this is a parallel question.) The exhibition is different, by turning the decision of how much time to devote to it toward the individual. The visitor can advance at his own rhythm, pause in front of what interests him and leave aside whatever doesn’t grab his attention, return to whatever he likes, or take a quick look around and leave the hall. At Raqs’ exhibition there will be those who walk through it in a few minutes, and those who devote a whole afternoon to it. Beyond that, I think that the exhibition will have as much of what is seen as of what isn’t seen. Their work is like a fine rain that gets into us little by little until we’re soaked. On a merely operational level, it has a dual point of entry, both intellectual—what you’ve called “situations of thought”—and emotional. I think that the exhibition is a place where all this can happen, and further still, where it should happen.
In Madrid, the exhibition will follow a circular route.
However Incongruous (2011) also begins from a reference to revolving. The rhinoceros we see has a bar, as if it were a figure on a carousel, a low-tech ride from another era. After giving it some thought, I have an idea of what that model is revolving around. Raqs’ rhinoceros is the colorful version of Dürer’s famous etching. Recalling this history is well worth a spin in our conversation. Exactly five hundred years ago, in 1514, Alfonso de Albuquerque, second viceroy of Portuguese India, attempted to tighten his diplomatic relations with Muzafar II, the sultan of Gujarat. The mission’s success was debatable, but it did obtain an interesting gift, a rhinoceros that was apparently given the name Gainda and which was swiftly sent to the metropole, Lisbon, where it arrived after a voyage of nearly four months. It was the first rhinoceros to have trod European soil since Antiquity, until then known exclusively through the narrations of Pliny the Elder. The expectations it aroused were enormous, and many were its misfortunes. It died when the boat that was transporting it was shipwrecked off the coast of Liguria, on its way to being delivered to Pope Leo X. Dürer never saw the animal. He completed his etching using an anonymous drawing, different written descriptions, including Pliny’s, as well as his own imagination. The success of this woodcut was unprecedented, possibly one of the etchings with greatest repercussions in history. For at least 150 years, it was their only credible description of this animal. Raqs reissued the journey of a rhinoceros from India to Lisbon, where it was exhibited a few years ago at the Fundação Gulbenkian, constructed on the grounds of an old amusement park where, surprise, there was a carousel. Curiously, now it will get back on a boat in Europe, headed for Mexico, let’s hope with better luck this time. The sculpture is the vision of some artists using another artist’s vision of something he never saw, in turn based partially on a drawing by an unknown party. This not only exemplifies Raqs’ way of working, but also emerges both as an invitation to chimerical imagination and as an insurgent, persistent reality.
When we organized the seminar in Madrid with Shuddhabrata, Monica and Jeebesh, a question was voiced: “How to be cosmopolitan without being colonized?”
Raqs IT’S WRITTEN BECAUSE IT’S WRITTEN
– The best kind of art, like the rain, invokes a re-ordering of the cognitive and sensory fields. It asks of its actual and potential publics to open doors and windows and let other worlds in. This re-ordering—subtle, slight, sure, sharp or soft as the case may be, whether it is a desultory drizzle across a few frazzled or jaded synapses, or the neurological equivalent of an electrical thunderstorm and sudden downpour—is why we bother with art in the first place. When it rains art, we do not reach for umbrellas. It makes sense to let ourselves soak, as long as we can, like children dancing in the season’s first rain.
– The artist also may or may not know all the things that every person will experience when they encounter his or her work; people bring their own histories, memories, scars and desires to bear on any work that they encounter. An artist cannot possibly know what these may be; in fact, when an artist works, he or she has Little or no intimation of how members of the public will get to know themselves when they face the work. The private language of the artist will never be the same as the private language with which the work will be “read” by its viewer. In this sense, the artist is like someone who writes a letter to a lover they do not know they have, in a language that they do not understand, without any guarantee that the letter will either reach its intended addressee or be opened and read, if indeed it ever arrives.
Like Don Quixote asking Sancho Panza to deliver to an unknown address a love letter written to a Dulcinea imagined only through desire,1 or like the lonesome forest spirit trying to inveigle a passing rain cloud into carrying messages to his distant lover in the opening canto of the classical Sanskrit verse-drama The Cloud Messenger2, artists often find themselves having to rely on mediators to even begin to become visible to their publics, their distant Dulcineas.
– An artistic action is the means by which humanity adjusts the infinity of being to itself. It necessitates the calling forth of that within human beings can participate in breaking the bonds of finitude, and act reciprocally to the plenitude of infinity. Rabindranath Tagore, in The Religion of Man, personifies this invocation as the “the angel of surplus” within human beings, the one who endows human existence with “…a surplus far in excess of the biological animal in Man, an overflowing influence that leads us over the strict boundaries of living, offering us an open space where Man’s thoughts and dreams could have their own holidays.” Although Tagore’s “angel of surplus” sings out to humanity to “rejoice”, in reality, the process of adjustment to infinity may be painful, pleasurable, abrasive, delightful, enervating or stimulating. Howsoever it’s immediate experience may be coloured, there can be no denying the fact that it transforms us from being “creatures” into becoming “creators” of the world. It enables us to make infinity speak through the language of contingency. Seen this way, an artist is the person who does not merely receive the world through her senses, but equally, the one who gives something back, sends something forth into the world.
– The action which we call artistic then has to deal with the fact that it exists in the interstices between senses of the self’s relation to the world: one possessed of infinity and plenitude and another constructed in response to constraint and limits. The politically committed are drawn to art because it offers them a mode of imagining realities other than the ones that constrain their being in the world, and artists are drawn to the arena of political action because their cultivation of a sensibility founded on plenitude is a resource that actually can have radical currency in an arena accustomed to the burden of constraints. This is what explains the traffic between art and activism.
– The value of a work of art consists of its ability to arrest, even if temporarily, the stream of purposive acts and dispositions that we bear as a routine of everyday life. It affords us, a moment’s respite from the strain of maintaining a purely functional, quantifiable profile within the boundaries of a conflicted and abrasive situation. This is not a dismissal of the mundane, but an attempt to seek substance, plenitude in quotidian things, gestures, acts as one sees with them, and through them, with a kind of “second sight” into a zone that is not pre-determined in terms of meaning by the way the world is administered and governed.
– A work of art does not have to conform to, nor confirm, the established order of the world. Were a work to be constrained thus, it would have to fit into an extant necessity in the existing arrangement of the world, much like a plug would fit a socket. When worn, it would have to be replaced, so long as the need for its presence existed, by an item identical to itself. Things of beauty, things that amuse and entertain or inform, may fulfil such requirements. No artistic gesture can trim itself to fill the absence co-incident with the void in a made to measure mould. On the contrary, the artistic gesture is founded on an intuition of multiplicity of sensations and perceptions to such an extent that it defeats the bounds that seek to keep it restrained.
– A dysfunctional world becomes obsessed with utility. Intriguingly, utility itself may be rendered dysfunctional because of the commonplace prospect of having to make utilitarian choices between a plethora of the identically useful, as in a supermarket aisle where we confront a hundred different shapes of the same mineral water. Similarly, a political language premised on the alienation of subjects from sovereignty overcompensates for its obvious disenfranchisement by its insistence on the primacy of representation. The combustive upsurge of insurgent crowds and masses are quickly, and urgently, sublimated by means of identity and unity: the enabling trick of representative politics trades the ambitions of leaders against the aspirations and practices for possible new configurations of collective life. The post-upsurge- state’s violence towards strikers, critics and dissidents bears out this fact time and again. In such circumstances, the freedom to be elusive and non-representable is sometimes the most dangerous thing for regimes in order to maintain the circus of their rule.
*The catalogue IT’S WRITTEN BECAUSE IT’S WRITTEN is an anthology of texts created by Raqs Media Collective, with a text curatorial by Cuauhtémoc Medina and images from the exhibition”.
http://www.yijunliao.com/photography/experimental-relationship/
Experimental Relationship, Home made suchi
Experimental Relationship, How to build a relationship with layered meanings
Yiyun Liao: Experimental Relationship (2007- Now) :
«As a woman brought up in China, I used to think I could only love someone who is older and more mature than me, who can be my protector and mentor. Then I met my current boyfriend, Moro. Since he is 5 years younger than me, I felt that whole concept of relationships changed, all the way around. I became the person who has more authority & power. One of my male friends even questioned how I could choose a boyfriend the way a man would choose a girlfriend. And I thought, « Damn right. That’s exactly what I’m doing, & why not! »
I started to experiment with this relationship. I would set up all kinds of situations for Moro and I to perform in the photos. My photos explore the alternative possibilities of heterosexual relationships. They question what is the norm of heterosexual relationships. What will happen if man & woman exchange their roles of sex & roles of power. Because my boyfriend is Japanese, and I am Chinese, this project also describes a love and hate relationship.
This project is an experiment to me, not a real document of our real relationship.»
Pimo Dictionary est une extension d’Experimental Relationship > http://www.yijunliao.com/book/pimo-dictionary/
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Documents photographiés dans l’exposition Mémoires croisées / dérives archivistiques Archives de la critique d’art, 13 mai-18 juillet 2015, INHA, Salle Roberto Longhi
photo © Anne Z., mère de Gaspard et Samuel : «Voici comme promis une image des créations pâte à modeler de Samuel (le volcan) et de Gaspard (l’étoile) bien inspirés de ce matin. Ils étaient tout contents de leur matinée à Saint-Denis ! Depuis notre retour, je n’arrive pas à faire sortir Gaspard de l’appartement, il veut rester jouer avec la PlayDoh… »
Jeegee, Trophees, glass-drawing, posca, réalisé le lundi 8 juin, sur la vitrine du hall d’exposition de l’université Paris 8, 2, rue de la Liberté, Saint-Denis, dans la partie consacrée à l’atelier des enfants de l’expo Vincennes imprime son cinéma, à Paris 8.