Impossible Failures (Gordon Matta-Clark & William Pope.L at 52 Walker) (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
On Art and Failure - written for The New School for Social Research 2013 Graduate Conference Failures held Friday, April 12th 2013
Andrzejewski & Bertinetto: What is wrong with failed art?
Studi di estetica, 2021
The aim of this paper is to argue that proper artistic failure may turn out to be artistically appreciated and even considered as artistically successful. A set of arguments is provided in order to overcome intentionalism, the widely accepted view according to which an artist's intentions fix the artwork's meaning. Instead, we propose and elaborate an alternative model: emergentism of artistic meaning and value. Emergentism explains how artistic failure can turn out to be artistically successful. That is, artworks may succeed despite the failure of the realization of artistic intentions. It is argued that such a rehabilitation of artistic failures, perceiving them as not necessarily doomed, paves the path for experiencing failures as not merely failures. The paper suggests that under defined circumstances it is possible to receive aesthetic satisfaction from failures. Moreover, the possibility of treating failures as valuable, yet risky, artistic strategy is suggested.
“The Triumph of Failure”- The Paradoxical Praxis of the Artist
Aesthetics, Professor of Dongduk Women's University in: Triumph of Failure, Seoul, 2010 "Those who fail to re-read are obliged to read the same story everywhere." -Roland Barthes, S/Z On October 19 th , 1839, physicist and politician Francesc Joan Domènec Aragó of the Académie des Sciences (Royal Academy of Sciences), announced the invention of photography, then literally a newborn technology in the history of the image. The technology of photography had developed along with progress in materials, science, technology, and economics, and took a crucial position as a decisive and absolute medium for understanding the shift of culture in evolving civilization. Although we cannot summarize the history of evolution or of progress in a few words, few would doubt the fact that the once-newborn technology has developed throughout the modern history of civilization without fatal ups and downs and now has acquired a gigantic power that can hardly be challenged by any other medium. In other words, since its beginning, photography has been on a winning streak both in the world of the real and in the world of imagery. Due to the documentation of the real [objective] world and its inhumane or scientific-technological aspects, photography became a research topic and methodology in the field of industry as well. With the direct (re)presentation and/or diverse expressions of things based on the optical vision of the camera, photography has taken the top spot in the history of the image over the traditional aesthetic sense based on pictorial representation.
Thomas J. Stopka on James Clark's “On A Brief Meditation on Failure and Defeat”
Substance Use & Misuse, 2012
In an introspective and frank meditation, Dr James Clark delves into the personal, professional, and structural challenges that we, as individuals, clinicians, researchers, interventionists, and mentors, are likely to face, if we have not already, over the course of our lives and careers. He reminds us that, through our "failings and defeats," we are likely to be humbled but fortified, brought to new personal and professional paths and "new worlds" in the process. Clark encapsulates this lesson in an autobiographical, professional sketch that juxtaposes his righteous, overconfident graduate student and burgeoning clinician self with his humbled, deflated, and enlightened psychoanalyst and social science professional self. The transformation from the former extreme to the latter, as described by the author, was made possible when failure and defeat entered the fray, paralleling a professional and personal experience of "hitting bottom," with its many intense, sobering, and stereotypical underpinnings. Reflecting on self-defined failures and defeats experienced decades prior with challenging young patients, and recollecting the words of an earlier clinician/thinker (Williams, 1948), Clark dares to ask the hard questions: "What is the world opened up by defeat?" and "What is the formerly unsuspected place that is always opened by defeat?" In a poignant revelation, Clark answers his own questions and encourages us to see that: The world opened up by defeat is the place of shared communion with the defeated. Only the experience of personal failure (no matter how relatively small) can open up the unsuspected place of connection with 'failing' people. .. (Clark, 2012, p.
2011
Whereas at the end of the twentieth century societies had to work through the traumatic effects of a century of political extremism and found the drive to rebuild society in the prospect of a better future, it is now, at the beginning of this new century, the fear of an inevitable and complete catastrophe that reigns. Worst-case scenarios have always played a role in the way our culture has imagined the future. The impending depletion of the world's oil resources, the devastating effects of climate change, steep population growth, the breakdown of the economic system, pandemics and the threat of international terrorism have made catastrophe into a crucial notion to understand our relation with our time today. More than ever before, the expectation of catastrophe shapes our notion and experience of temporality and influences our ability to act in the present. This book wants to question the present future of calamity by focusing on the imagining of catastrophe, in art, architecture and philosophy. It collects some of the most inspiring contributions of the conference TICKLE YOUR CATASTROPHE! and reflects the interdisciplinary approach of this meeting. The first part entitled "Ruin value" addresses the motif of the ruin in visual art and urban planning. The second section "State of Emergency" gathers texts on catastrophism in philosophy and literature. The contributions of "Media Disaster" focus on how images of catastrophe are mediated and mediatized in film, painting, the news and the performing arts. Subsequently, the final section "Worst-case Scenarios" considers the method of scenario thinking as a common strategy in the political discourse on global warming, the military, artistic interventions and urban planning.