Inspiring blog

http://arttorrents.blogspot.com/
inactive since 2008, but the stuff thats there is interesting

josefin r

Text for AVATARVARO, Premiere 8 dec, Stockholm

(this text will originally be published in SWE, here food for thought)


To be the body without the mind.
To reflect with passive distance on the actions performed by the body, as if they were not one's own.
To experience proximity to another person freed from the isolation of the “I”.

In the meeting of avatars there is complicity and trust, a twinkle of an eye, a silent undertone.
Whilst the operators'  isolated “I”s desperately attempt to overcome the undefinable divide between them the avatars are already there, they are already mobilizing.
They have found that they have something in common, in the midst of freedom from power and responsibility. .
And perhaps this experience of community is about (for once) ending up  on the "right" side in the great simplified Revolutionary drama - without hypocracy or divided identities.

In all of this, the hand-over becomes a happy one, like a romantic form of apathy.
Why do we want to hand ourselves over like this?
Is it not enough to be spectators in the society and time we are living in, do we also want to be spectators to our own lives, to the actions performed by our own bodies? Maybe it is the expression of a generations impotence in relation to the global problems and power-structures that define their lives. Why are we supposed to take responsibility of something we have no power over, of problems we haven't created?

Or perhaps it isn't a time-specific behavior, rather the opposite; it is this readiness to mental slavery and freedom of responsibility desired by our parents and their parents that have shaped the power-structures that we are now living with.
In that case, we should rather free ourselves from romantic notions from apathy.
Its all the same in the end though - we decide guiltily and throw ourselves into a liberation from all responsibility.


There is an image of an installation by Anish Kapoor - in the middle of the floor in a completely white room is a perfectly black and flat circle. (See Descent into Limbo, 1992) (1).
Except its not a circle but a hole, a hole that seems to open beyond the room, beyond the frontier constituted by the floor, wall or installation.
On the other side of the hole is the nothingness, a great dark dissolution of the "I". The void.
It is horrifying and seductive, and inviting.

The Operator has the power through agreement, and we can assume that there is also an agreement for how this power may be used.
Thereby we have crossed to the other side of the frontier, we have handed ourselves over and the discussion has shifted towards what comes next. 
Marina Abramovic made a performance in 1974, Rythm 0, in which she handed over the power to the audience. She had placed 72 objects on a table, amongst others a rose, honey,
a feather, a whip a gun and a bullet. The audience was invited to use these tools on the artist, as they chose, for pain or pleasure.
The session lasted for 6 hours and when the time was up she walked of the stage bleeding.
She is reported to have said "What I learned was that ...if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you"(2).

The audience that caresses with a feather or loads a bullet into the gun hides behind both Operator and Avatar, and the relation between them is least to say ambivalent.
Both can view what is happening with distance; one because s-he does not make the decisions that rule his/her actions,
and the other because s-he always maintains the physical distance to any potential consequences that may come as result of these actions.
What comes next. Through the darkness.
Perhaps the only insight is that there is only more darkness, and if we hand over the power it will further or later be used against us.
Or perhaps - apart from the various monsters of humanity -  there are caverns deep down in the dark, in the shapeless, blunt betweenspace where only the Avatars can fit.
And perhaps that is the strength of the avatars. Beyond the competition of the "I"s they are gathering an underground army. ;-))

(1) Descent into Limbo, 1992, Museum de Pont, Tilburg, NL, Groen, Rianne,
http://riannegroen.blogspot.com/2011/01/into-unknown-void-in-contemporary-art.html
(2) A Daneri, et al., (eds.), Marina Abramović, (Charta, 2002),  p 29

www. turteatern.se/avatarvaro/


Josefin r

"Escape Attempts" Lucy R Lippard

Good evening!

I just finished reading “Escape Attempts,” Lucy Lippard’s introduction to her book on conceptual art, Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972:

I find it inspiringly pragmatic and there are loads of ideas from it that I think could be looked at and discussed further. At this point I was reading it 1) because I like the way she writes, 2) Im doing a little research as you may know on art connected to ideas of void/ emptiness/ postapocalyptic melancholia and its cultural/ historical context, and stumbled on this. 

In any case, I think the final paragraph is somewhat of a cut-out-and-keep-in-you-pocket:

Perhaps most important, Conceptualists indicated that the most exciting "art" might still be buried in social energies not yet recognised as art. The process of extending the boundaries didn't stop with Conceptual art: These energies are still out there, waiting for artists to plug into them, potential fuel for the expansion of what "art" can mean. The escape was temporary. Art was recaptured and sent back to its white cell, but parole is always a possibility. 

 Cheerful and cynical at the same time.

Whole text

/Josefin r

Intelligent Bodies

Intelligent Bodies and Ecological Subjectivities:
Merleau-Ponty’s Corrective to Postmodernism’s
“Subjects” of Education


This is a text my Mum forwarded on to me yesterday. It's categorized under philosophy of education but I found it relevant to multiple concerns. I really like that these ideas re-unite all aspects of lived experience and don't atomize the complexity of how we physically experience and navigate the world. the ideas in relation to location are particularly relevant to engage2012 as-well as ideas about 'encountering' the world rather than 'perceiving' it.


READ THE FULL TEXT HERE


//emma

something lovely

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.


Emma

Shoplifters of the World Unite - Slavoj Žižek on the meaning of the riots

"Alain Badiou has argued that we live in a social space which is increasingly experienced as ‘worldless’: in such a space, the only form protest can take is meaningless violence. Perhaps this is one of the main dangers of capitalism: although by virtue of being global it encompasses the whole world, it sustains a ‘worldless’ ideological constellation in which people are deprived of their ways of locating meaning. The fundamental lesson of globalisation is that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilisations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East: there is no global ‘capitalist worldview’, no ‘capitalist civilisation’ proper. The global dimension of capitalism represents truth without meaning."

Real the full article HERE

Emma

Julia Kristeva - Strangers to Ourselves

This text by Julia Kristeva is very well attuned to our project. I have posted some extracts below, most of the text can be read online HERE. I particularly like how she suggests that we not attempt to solidify 'otherness' but 'merely touch it...without giving it a permanent structure'. 

Emma

PSYCHOSIS part I

 

I saw the exhibition Psychosis Part I at Färgfabriken in Stockholm. I thought these two works perhaps esp. interesting to Emma. Also these are works by artists in the nextdoor countries to Romania.  I really liked the one below by Chto Delat?

Another note that I found personally interesting has to do with to contrast between this exhibition 

and the one next door; works from the Master Students at Konstfack textile dep. The first was so incredibly dense, full of words, reference, overlapping sounds and importance, the second was whitish, silent, still, and as if hanging suspended mid air in no-time space. 

//J

JUDITH BUTLER QUOTEs-emma's notebook

Judith Butler from 'Undoing Gender' 

Good to consider when thinking about the 'other'

I come back to this a lot