Feel Your Way: A proposition concerning transitional spaces and the autobiographical (original) (raw)

Warsaw talk When I was invited to present a talk at this event, I was very excited about the prospect of visiting Warsaw, of being a part of a symposium with artists whose work is dedicated to the explorations of the self and various ways of approaching the autobiographical, of thinking about these questions through the lens of feminism and the politics of representation, and of course, discussing these ideas under the auspices of this excellent exhibition of Maria Lassnig's work. As I began my research for this presentation, I became somewhat despondent that I had not seen any of Lassnig's works in the flesh, as it were. I felt acutely aware of the fact that this was an artist whose work demanded visual, emotional, and visceral contact. I wondered what I could do about this, and began searching for museums and galleries that I could visit-to experience such an encounter with Lassnig's work-while I was preparing the talk. The more research I did, the more uncanny the experience became. Lassnig's work was incredibly familiar to me. It was increasingly evocative, and stirred something inside me. And yet, this familiarity was not possible, or was it? I continued to research Lassnig's work, and, I came across her wonderfully quirky, witty and melancholic film Kantate (1972) on youtube. Kantate, 1972, still While watching it, I was startled to realize that I had in fact seen it before. How could this be the case? 1 Check out work by Nicola Tyson-'psycho-figurations'.