Materia Poetica: Models of Corporeality and Onto-Poetic Pata-Physics of the Post-Mechanical Age (original) (raw)
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In his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Jean Jacques Rousseau complains about the vocabulary of the Age of Reason. Once the Cartesian mind acquires the confidence needed to read the book of Nature in the language of mathematics who someone is eludes philosophical knowledge. As Hannah Arendt (1958) put it, as soon as we want to express who someone is, our language leads us into the realm of saying what he is. Indeed, much of recent literature has been engaged in the quest to recover at least some degree of "unique existent" -to borrow the term used by Adriana Cavarero (2000). For Arendt and Cavarero, we only know who somebody is by knowing the story of which he himself is a hero. Like, for example, Oedipus, Odysseus-Ulysses, Scheherazade, but also Musil's (1955) Ulrich -the Man without Qualities, Eco's (1989) Belbo or Sebald's (2001) Austerlitz, we are destined to be wanderers in search of our lifestory.
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Narrativas errantes entre espacios reales e imaginarios: obras, imágenes y los lugares de los discursos Wandering narratives between real and imaginary spaces: works, images and places of speeches TIPO DE TRABAJO: Comunicación. PALABRAS CLAVE Arte contemporánea, formas de reproducción, crítica y producción, performance. KEY WORDS Contemporary art, forms of reproduction, criticism and production, performance. RESUMEN Si el museo, al separar la obra de arte del mundo 'profano' inauguraba una nueva relación con el público, consagrando su condición autónoma, las recientes diversificaciones de las formas de reproducción-digitales o analógicas-, amplían infinitamente la posibilidad de confronto entre museos reales e imaginarios, como indica Malraux (1994), estimulando prácticas culturales en permanente elaboración y circulación. Este trabajo explora la discusión provocada por la profusión de imágenes en el ambiente cultural contemporáneo, aproximando visiones polisémicas formuladas en narrativas provenientes de distintos lugares de discurso: el relato del escritor que lee imágenes e cuenta lo que ve se entrelaza con la comprensión de los críticos de arte y con el discurso del artista que usa la palabra y la escritura como instrumentos de reflexión y de dirección del propio proceso creativo. Alberto Manguel (2000) establece un paralelo entre imágenes y palabras como medio de reconocimiento de la experiencia del mundo denominado "real". George Kluber (2002) sobrepone el dominio de las cosas hechas por el hombre al de la historia del arte, investigando la producción artística en Europa occidental por medio de las relaciones establecidas entre "objetos primos" y réplicas, o sea, un complejo encadenamiento desarrollado en el transcurso del tiempo, entre entidades originales y sus derivaciones, réplicas, transposiciones. Luigi Pareyson (2002) contrapone tal noción, substituyendo la idea de origen y derivación de la imagen por la concepción de un proceso endógeno resultante de motes y estímulos impulsados por el propio quehacer artístico, movido por la dinámica de alternancia entre consciencia y espontaneidad, entre sistema e libertad. La producción contemporánea de Esther Ferrer, al lidiar con la regla y el acaso, transitando por diferentes lenguajes, reaproximando arte y vida, memoria e invención, permite un análisis empírico en el cual las diferentes comprensiones aquí referenciadas pueden ser discutidas y confrontadas. ANIAV Asociación Nacional de Investigación en Artes Visuales This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) De Almeida, Eneida; Nascimento, Myrna de Arruda Narrativas errantes entre espacios reales e imaginarios: obras, imágenes y los lugares de los discursos
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Phenomenological critique of Galilean modernity The pre-modern age was the age of narratives. The status of nature, "things" and human activity, were given by powers external to humans. Such norms can only be accessed via recollection or revelation. With the advent of the Galilean "measure and quantify" the normative power of traditional narratives was fatally weakened. For Kant space and time are "forms of perception". The human activity then takes place in an abstract container overseen by a clock. The practices of e.g. perspective drawing transplanted this notion of an abstract observer into the domain of daily routines. The individual's claim to immortality as a creator can only be legitimised through disinterested inquiry resulting in a "proof"; the problem is identified and explained away. It is then deposited for eternity-with a suitable label-in one of the cemeteries of human achievement (museum, archive, library, databank). Only that part of the material condition of humanity that is amenable to measurement and codification in terms of universal variables has existence and meaning. The neutrality (universality, autonomy) of space, time, object and subject created operational space for an unprecedented growth in mathematisation and mastery of nature. As for authentic experiences of bodily life (now, here, I) these seemed destined to be sacrificed on the altar of complexity for the sake of complexity. The phenomenological turn in philosophy is often viewed as an attempt to redeem the primacy of bodily life and creativity. Space and time are a medium rather then a container for human activity, for events. In the phenomenological perspective of Heidegger "spaces receive their essential being from locations" (Heidegger, 1972, p.332). Humans' "dwelling" and staying with things cannot be separated from "space" and "time". "Dwelling is accomplished in the nearing of things" (Casey, 1998, p.274). Indeed, for Heidegger this dwelling is a key concept connecting humans to a primordial form of Being, to the full richness of existence. Since space and time are now "existential", our being and consciousness are necessarily "local". Merleau-Ponty argues that the human body is a junction where thought and world meet and interact. "…my experience breaks forth into things…it always comes into being …within a certain setting in relation to the world which is the definition of my body" (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.303). Perceptual consciousness is not merely a thought about the world out there but a product of bodily orientation and motion in the world, a part of the ontological process that constitutes place-ness. The phenomenology of the social Being-in-the-World is not to be understood in terms of "universal" variables such as, for example, Marx's class, surplus value and means of production but in a move from "space" to "place", from subject and object to "things". "Meaning" of "place" is then grounded in the consciousness of it. It "is" (" meaningful") to the extent to which it is a "living place", reaching perhaps as far as the folds of "the coupling of the virtual-actual" (Deleuze, 1993,
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The role played by temporality in the affectivity and interpretation of art has been, in general, an area long and unjustly neglected. This is an omission that I wish to begin to redress in the course of this article. I want especially to comment upon medieval and renaissance art, treating them as key periods in the history of Western art in terms of their open and frequent use of temporal potentials for the furtherance of narrative and other rhetorical, that is, persuasive, ends. Such potentials were to become hidden, employed with terms of temporal presence and belief (and not simply as the external witness of a given narrative process or sacral event). (iii) The two previous stages should permit historians and cultural anthropologists to work upon reconstructions of devotion, meditation, the mentalité of a given artwork's implied audience, and their relations of collective self-recognition or construction of identity. The issue is one of achieving a viewpoint from within a community sharing a pattern of rhetoric, a code of communication.
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From a historical perspective, the book studies how modernist artists, as the first generation who began to rethink intensively the legacy of German Idealism, sought to recreate the self so as to recreate their relationships with the material world. Theoretically, the book converses with the topical de-anthropocentric interests in the 21st century and proposes that the artist may escape human-centeredness through the transformation of the self. Part One, “Artificiality,” begins the discussion with the fin-de-siècle cult of artificiality, where artists such as Theophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, J.K. Huysmans, and Gustave Moreau dedicate themselves to love stony sphinxes, marble statues, and inorganic appearances. The cult of artificiality is a mischievous subversion to Hegel’s maxim that inwardness is superior to matter. In the cult of artificiality, art is superior to nature, though art is no longer defined as immaterial imagination but rather reconfigured as mysterious appearances that defy signification and subjugate the feeling heart. Part Two, “Auto-philosophical Fiction,” discusses the genre where the artists (Marcel Proust, Walter Pater, and Virginia Woolf) set philosophical ideas in the laboratory of their lives and therefore translate their aesthetic ideals—the way they wish to relate to the world—into a journey of self-examination and self-cultivation. In Pater’s novel 'Marius the Epicurean', the hero explores how a philosophical percept may be translated into sentiments and actions, demonstrating that literature is a unique approach to truth as it renders theory into a transformative experience. Exploring the latest findings of empiricist psychology, the artists seek to escape the Kantian trap by cultivating their powers of reception and to register passing thoughts and sensations. Together, the book argues that de-anthropocentrism cannot be predicated upon a metaphysics that presumes universal subjectivity but must be a form of aesthetic inquiry that recreates the self in order to recreate our relationships with the world.
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Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, 2019
In recent times, a heterogeneous set of institutions, such as, journals, websites, cooperative spaces of creation, peculiar galleries and museums, have been founded in order to call into question the creative boundaries between art and science. Moreover, famous artists like Eduardo Kac and Natalie Jeremijenko have also called into question these boundaries even before those institutions were founded. In addition, philosophy has also grasped the problematic by publishing academic papers in famous journals like Leonardo. A question arises, have the boundaries between art and science been dissolved by the artifacts of these artists? Moreover, are there actual or clear differences among traditional arts, mainstream contemporary art, and scientific and technological arts? Against standard perspectives in philosophy and history of art, I hold that some forms of scientific art are consequences of a historical process which I would like to call “defictionalization” and “demimetization” of arts. This defictionalization is, I argue, associated to the process that Lucy Lippard has called “dematerialization” of contemporary art. The defictionalization traces the boundaries among these recent forms of art by virtue of the cognitive consequences in the receptors. Naturalization and reification of our aesthetic comprehension of everyday social and physical world is a key consequence of that process. This process that contemporary art is going through, allows us to question about the nature of the latest art history and, of course, about the nature of the art criticism.
Evisioning Architectural Narratives, 2021
Architecture has both interactive and analogical relationships with language. A designed building originates in a linguistic document, the design brief providing a list of functional categories and quantities. In the case of building programmes, such as libraries, museums and art galleries, the word-like function of the classifications of contents in space are preceded by classifications recorded in texts and reflecting the history of thought. The analogical relationship between architecture and language goes back to the 19th century and the idea that works of architecture should be read like books, narratives or texts (Forty, 2004). Quatremère de Quincy for example, likened historical monuments to libraries - public inscriptions or records of the people. This idea came under strong criticism in the 20th century after modernism asserted that buildings were to be read as autonomous works. Writing on the occasion of the Museum of Modern Art’s fifth anniversary in 1934 Alfred Barr, Jr., MoMA’s founding director, set up a dichotomy between an intellectual understanding of art mediated by words and a direct experience of art that comes from the unmediated encounter between the viewer and the object. ‘Words about art may help to explain techniques, remove prejudices, clarify relationships, suggest sequences, and attack habitual resentments through the back door of intelligence. But the front door of understanding is through experience of the work of art itself’ (Barr, 1934). Similarly to art, architecture has been affected by a longstanding assumption that ‘experiences mediated through the senses are fundamentally incompatible with those mediated through language’ (Forty 2004, 12). Yet, as Adrian Forty explains, even if architecture is not a language this does not lessen the value of language for understanding architecture. Bill Hillier for example, has made a productive analogy between the syntax of space and the syntactic and semantic structure of language. The characteristic spatial relationships that define the cultural inhabitation of space are similar to linguistic rules we use in speaking and writing, or the unconscious mechanisms we ‘think with’ (Hillier 1996). If ordinary language offers a paradigm for understanding the unconscious apparatus of meaning-making in architecture, what about the literary function of language? This question concerns works of architecture as intentional aesthetic systems rather than as unconscious structures shared within a society like language. It also allows literary narrative to function as a critical tool and a design 24 | Keynote Paper Sophia Psarra tool as opposed to explanatory paradigm. If the principles of spatial structure function similarly to those of ordinary language, what can we say about narrative devices or rules used in literary texts? Or what about buildings as social objects, understood in a historical context and the ordering mechanisms of language to organize cultural messages and relations of power? In this essay I address these questions first, by focusing on how devices ordering our perception of space and time in literature can illuminate spatial practices as aesthetic systems; second, by exploring our perception of space-time in buildings housing collections, such as museums, galleries and exhibitions. Buildings devoted to displays share the assumption that the spatial arrangement of objects, supported by object-based interpretation, offer a narrative to be understood through the physical experience of reading, looking, and walking. This experience is staged by the linguistic strategies of classification, taxonomy and lists, and the architectural strategies of viewing sequences, mediating the encounter between the architect, the curator, the objects and the viewer. Museums, galleries and private collections therefore, are ideal candidates for addressing the analogic and interactive encounter of architecture with linguistic strategies and narrative form. The choice of these narrative strategies is critical when the container is itself a historical monument or is embedded in a historical context, as the meanings that are attached to the building and the displays can be motivated and invested with potential significance. Although separated by a century and a half, John Soane and Carlo Scarpa had a strong relationship with history and context as artistic practices and inspirational resources. Soane’s house-museum and Scarpa’s projects such as the Castelvecchio, the Olivetti Showroom and the Canova’s extension, seem to present a common paradigm: all housing collections, albeit Soane’s house-museum accommodates his own private collection; all fusing the architects’ own interventions within the existing fabric; all collaging contemporary architecture over the substrate of previous historical episodes; all eschewing the idea of a single unified form as the central governing composition by which the building could be read; all forcing the visitor into sinuous routes and around art works to see the building and the objects. For Nicholas Olsbeg, Scarpa opened the possibility for an architecture in union with poetry, sculpture, painting and craft around the themes of memory, allegory and metaphor (Olsberg, 1999). Soane also conceived his house-museum as a union of architecture with the arts, engaging in spatial optical mechanisms and an eccentric taste in narrative expression (Soane 1830, 1832, 1835-36). Deriving from these common tendencies for itineraries and multiple associations, works of the two architects present suitable examples to examine the perception of space, time and meaning, drawing parallels between motifs in architecture and narrative.
Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 2022
This article considers scientific data and methods taken as a vocabulary for a visual language of poetics, shaping an artistic practice exploring the liminal poetics of space, time, science and mythology, equally considered. These artworks focus on the moving image as an immersive, architectonic construct, one that makes it possible to blur the boundary between space and time. They are cinematic environments that create a space of spatial and temporal ambiguity, open to the performative role of the viewer in composing the unfolding narrative. The artworks presented here began in the crossover between art and science, technology and society, exploring topics and incorporating methods from each area. Transdisciplinary processes play a critical role in this artistic research. These works reflect cinema approached as a multimodal field of possibilities in which montage motivates movement and focus through this field, creating a participatory composition of sight, sound, movement and memory that immerses viewers by actuating somatic perception. Shape, scale, immersion, interactivity, simultaneity, embodiment, implementation and the manipulation of time create concrete metaphors that echo the multivalent content of the works: a collaboration with 300 tropical spiders to create a Kino, then letting the audience walk freely among them (or the spiders freely among the audience); an immersive environment enacting the space-time of glacial ice to experience the time of a different form of matter as somatosensory experience; a journey through the human history of the Moon, transcending time, political ideologies, realities and cultures as an encompassing field of simultaneous views and sounds; performing a 2000-year-old act of Thessalian magic on the skyline of Hong Kong. Combining the technological tools available to cinema and science, contrasting magnifications and speeds of observation reveal a material poetics beyond appearance. The artworks presented here elaborate the details of cardinal subjects, diving deep into fundamental domains to unravel the cultural implications embedded within the aesthetics of their data artefacts.