"The Organisation and Biology of a Practice" (original text in Spanish in Susana Talayero : crónica inquieta : 1987-2016. [Exhib. cat.]. Bilbao : Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa = Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2016, pp. 27-43. (original) (raw)
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Occasionally there is a contemporary art exhibition which is so profoundly moving and thought provoking that you almost forget it is 'of the moment' because it feels like it has or should always have existed. Everything the artist brings together blends so effortlessly and poetically that the entire experience transcends mere academic prose, making the communication of the artist's ideas in this way rather challenging. This essay takes the recent exhibition of Janice Gordon in the Museo di Zoologia ‘La Specola’ at the University of Florence, where she asked ‘What is embodied?’ She is not the first to ask this question but through her art she clearly and eloquently formulated an answer, proving that all art is able to provide us with a form of condensed knowledge that captures our concrete and lived experience in ways that escape discursive prose. Her personal art/visual media was not just inspired by medical procedures and bodily trauma but it is a historical narrative of what it is to be Janice Gordon. We may have had similar health experiences to the artist, but the physical manifestation of her point of view is unique, just as our or your experience would be. What I shall be demonstrating here is how she did this, drawing on and combining the three points of exhibition, location and theory as ways to discuss the concept of embodiment. Literature on the topic is vast therefore I have taken three books – dipping into others where necessary – that discuss embodiment from different viewpoints; the sociological, the aesthetic and clinical/psychological. This ensures that Gordon's art has a theoretical structural framework, especially regarding the duality of body and mind, as well as the arguing that it is within the very nature of embodiment to encompass both the particular and the general. I open with a description of the exhibition; Gordon’s representations of the body in wax, paper, video, found objects, combined with a dialogue with the exhibition's location, enables discussion regarding the nature of embodiment from many perspectives. At the heart of the essay there are deeper interpretations of her work, where I connect references to the feminine body, heart disease, the wax Venuses of ‘La Specola’, anatomy and its relation with art history.
It is thought that matter can be invoked through ineffable means, through forces of intuition, inspiration or reflection. From what fragile testimonies and bodily influences arouse. This paper is concerned with the interplay between encounter and insistence in the experimental philosophies of contemporary "emergent" science. It considers how the biological can persuade variations of life that generate natural, social and cultural existence. Through architectural and aesthetic tropes, the writing gestures towards an esoteric materiality as it considers the transformative momentum of bodies offered by advances in fertility science and in regenerative skin technologies, and explores the performative yet quiescent spaces of their lived negotiations. What was once thought the culturally artifactual body now grants artful access to scientific knowledge creation through its inherently unsettled nature and the attendance of alteration. Experimentally, this paper wonders if questions of corporeal ecology can be sustained in an era of scientific knowing (still) imbued with vulnerability.
Hacer la presencia: fotrografía, arte y (bio)tecnología
Hacer la presencia : fotrografía, arte y (bio)tecnología, 2013
TRATNIK, Polona, Hacer la presencia. Fotografía, arte y (bio)tecnología = To Do the Presence. Photography, art, and biotechnology, Mexico City: Herder, 2013, 276 pp. ISBN 978-607-7727-28-6 In the monograph To-Make-Live Beyond Body and Art the author focuses on the theme of live and the contemporary relation of art to life with an important emphasis-she does not discuss the mediums and works where life is represented but those projects in which life is performed or the very contemporary transart projects that manipulate with life on the basis of relating life sciences (genetics, neurosciences, tissue engineering, regenerative medicine etc.) with art. Generally speaking, the monograph is especially devoted to the medium of photography and the artistic efforts to exceed it as a medium, and to biotechnology or the biotechnological efforts to intervene into the corporeal. As regards the latter the author discusses the artistic uses of biotechnology and the political charge of biotechnology to manipulate the body. Tratnik recognizes it as the technology for the contemporary power-to-make-live investing in the body and improving the quality of the active social body of the population. Representability-Performativity-Rhizome In this chapter the author discusses the key concepts: representation, performativity and rhizome, that serve her to introduce a theory on the transition of art from representational media to performativity, and onward to rhizomatic composing. Writing, painting and photography are media that communicate with differential signs, while with performativity a medium tends to be exceeded with direct effect in the action of communication. Medium as such dictates communication with signs, however, composing a rhizome, as in transart projects, means a tendency to exceed stable organization, any kind of closeness, representation and even presentation-it is a reality itself. Auratic Potential of a Copy: Presence, Death and Revivification with Photography Photography anticipates death, however photographs of the dead additionally communicate that the people portrayed are already dead, thus photography testifies about the death. There are some contemporary art projects that aim, using photography, to resist the slithering of life toward death-if death is understood as a boundary then these projects are shifting it into the future. Or, simultaneously or in other cases, the artists using photography and related techniques aspire to playback the aliveness of the dead and to perform an auratic synthesis of the passing away. The chapter is devoted to photography as a medium where the effect of the image could be exceeded in such a manner to bring the presence and produce life and death as in the cultures that were familiar with the cult of the dead, where the dead is embodied where he/she cannot be (in effigie). Through semiotic and psychoanalytic analyses of photography the questions of the presence/absence, death and life are comprehended in regard to the photographs of alive and dead people. Opening the Diaphragm The chapter is focused on portrait photography. The early photographic portraits were meant to synthesize the environment and the duration into the auratic moment of photography. The author discusses the issue of posing for photography and investigates some contemporary photographic projects which are devoted to ontological questions of photography and try to exceed it as a medium with opening into space and time. In such a manner photography is not a static tracing of the world, its closure, but its mediality gets deconstructed. Some contemporary art projects using photography try to catch the resistance and slithering of life towards death, and to playback the aliveness of the dead. Another project opens a moment of production of a photograph and one can walk within the space, although the event is missing. Yet another project corporeally includes the viewer in the photographic installation, where the photograph is for him/her with his/her own movement opening into the space and time and thus from a tracing grows a map, a world.
Missé The Botanical Mirror of the Self in La Mettrie's Man as Plant (Esprit Createur, 2022) Article
L'esprit créateur, 2022
Much unlike Machine Man (1747) La Mettrie’s best-known work, his Man as Plant (1748) undertakes the undoing of the metaphysical foundations of our human species’ difference from other forms of natural life. La Mettrie is not opposed to the recognition of what is properly human in nature. What he contests is our self-aggrandized sense of species superiority rooted in a supposed ontological difference between human and other natural beings. Man as Plant works toward challenging this conception by insisting on the “analogies we find in the two major kingdoms”—plants and animals, as he states—for “there is in our Species, like in Plants, a principal Root, and capillary roots.”1 La Mettrie’s natural history is in fact an invitation to reengage with our natural roots, our plant and animal roots, from a materialist point of view. Returning to the root also means here allowing and performing a series of identifications between Man and Nature, in order to produce a different, non-metaphysical genealogy of the “I” or the Self, and to bring new desires to consciousness.
Reflexiones ecológicas: intervenciones artísticas en y por la naturaleza
Atenea, UPRM, 2006
publica artículos relacionados con las humanidades y las ciencias sociales escritos en español o en inglés y algunos cuentos y poemas. Los artículos deben regirse por las normas estipuladas en la última edición del manual del Modern Language Association of America (MLA). Favor de enviar tres copias a la Editora, Revista Atenea, PO Box 9265, Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, Mayagüez, Puerto Rico 00681.
caa.reviews, 2004
In her recent book The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution, Pamela H. Smith contributes to a growing body of scholarship that reevaluates the relationship between art and science in early modern Europe. She argues that the roots of the Scientific Revolution may be found in the products and practices of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century artisans. Equating active knowledge with handworkers, Smith sees the physical engagement of craftsmen with matter and nature as a particular, valuable form of cognition linked to what she calls a "vernacular" or "artisanal epistemology." She proposes that we consider this vernacular epistemology as "forming a kind of common intellectual currency" shared by artisans, alchemists, medical practitioners, and "all practices associated with changes of state…" (145).
Sob a pele da escultura: uma breve nota sobre as propostas contemporâneas de Susana Piteira
Revista Gama, Estudos Artísticos, 2020
Susana Piteira proposes a peculiar approach to sculpture. In this process, we need to cross concepts that tend to be rare in the contemporary panorama. It is not just a sculpture that involves an assumed return to the “hand”, form, matter and artistic technologies as rescued, (re)considered as key elements. It is an aesthetic proposal that implies modes of sensitivity that expand our double gaze on the body, both in its exteriority and its interiority.
Gabriela Dragnea Horvath Ecology and Thought: the case of Flowers 1
From a biological viewpoint flowers are the reproduction organs of plants and were attested as such in empirical science since the first botanical taxonomies of antiquity, but the human agents have domesticated many of the wild flowers and have used both the wild and the cultivated for a variety of purposes that divert flowers from accomplishing their biological role. Thus they can serve as nourishment, healing remedies, poisons, drugs, sources of color and perfume, objects of decoration, of worship, totems, and carriers of messages to other humans and to the divine. In addition to the immediate experience with flowers, humans have integrated their names or images in meaning constructs, making them participants in art objects, poetic discourses, religious narratives, ethics, language expressions. A noteworthy function of flowers is replacing language in communication, either by their simple evocative presence, or in artificial idioms based on conveying a specific meaning to each type of flower. All these uses of flowers plead for their relevance in human culture, as J. Goody's magisterial work on the subject proves: 2 they illustrate the wide range of capacities humans attribute to them from fertility, nutritional, charming or destructive power, to beauty, and symbolic expression.
El canon accidental. Mujeres artistas en Argentina (1890-1950), 2021
Biografías de artistas mujeres en ocasión de la exposición El Canon Accidental. Mujeres artistas en Argentina (1890-1950) curada por Georgina Gluzman en el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires). Texto en español e inglés.
2015
The field of biological arts deals with modern biological knowledge, its applications and outcomes as both medium and subject. This is a transgressive and explorative art form that draws its inspiration and discourses from a diverse array of disciplines and modes of art expressions. At this stage it seems to be too early to discuss biological art as a movement per se, but rather it can be analysed as a problematic engagement with a new medium for artistic expression. The motivations and backgrounds of the main artists in this emerging field range from formalistic approaches to total transgression of both the artistic and scientific discourses. Works that involve living components in their presentation can be seen in many cases as time base works. They are durational pieces that can be viewed as an ‘art as documentation’. In his essay Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation, the Russian critic Boris Groys (2002) explains this turn towards ‘art as documentatio...