Radical Gesture and the Politics of Postdramatic Tragedy: Reza Abdoh's The Law of Remains (original) (raw)

AGENCIES OF ART AS GESTURE: RESISTANCE, PERFORMANCE OR EVENT

Hfbk Hamburg, 2021

This paper explores works of art as a gestural event. What charac- terizes gesture, and which agencies in latter art and aesthetics can perform those characters? If we examine artworks by their gestural condition, what differences do they make from the modernist reading? Since contemporary art is increasingly becoming participatory and the realization of a piece complete with beholders intervention, accompa- nying expressive qualities, performative disposition of the work in the site, tempus and cultural strain became integral. Gesture converges artworks interiority towards its context and the recipient. With Vilém Flusser’s sense of gesture as metaphoric and metaphysical, Georgio Agamben’s idea of gesture as a pure medial condition and Walter Benjamin’s gestural arrest as technical reproduction, I will discuss how different aesthetic apparatus cultivate gesture as a performance of the artistic event. Reading a work of art as a gesture is –– essentially op- posing the modernist project of obscuring an event with its reduction- istic causal analysis, hence I claim an act of resistance.

ART(S) OF BECOMING: PERFORMATIVE ENCOUNTERS IN CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL ART

METU Institute of Social Sciences, 2017

This thesis analyses Deleuze & Guattari’s notion of becoming through certain performative encounters in contemporary political art, and re-conceptualizes them as “art(s) of becoming”. Art(s) of becoming are actualizations of a non-representational –minoritarian– mode of becoming and creation as well as the political actions of fleeing quanta. The theoretical aim of the study is, on the one hand, to explain how Platonic Idealism is overturned by Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche and Leibniz, and on the other hand, how Cartesian dualism of mind and body is surpassed by following a Spinozistic theory of affects. In this respect, the dissertation has both theoretical and practical dimensions. Since art(s) of becoming are bodies without organs which constitute their own lines of flight through a process of minoration, the concepts of body, affect, becoming, and intensity are central to this study. For the same reason, this is an attempt to show the intersections of philosophical, political and aesthetic domains in Deleuze’s theory of sensation which is part of his general practice of philosophy, that is, a quest for establishing an ontology of immanence as opposed to identitarian metaphysics.

Performativity and the Altermodernities: Occupy, Bodies and Time-Spaces

Performativity and the Altermodernities: Occupy, Bodies and Time-Spaces, 2021

In the final months of 2010, a new global cycle of protests and social movements emerged that, as the following text will argue, has forced us to critically interrogate and transform the accepted ways in which theorists and researchers perceive the relation between aesthetics and politics, performativity and critical practice, modernity and its presupposed mimetic dynamics between the Global North and the Global South. These protest movements will be examined as various instances of the general category that we can call “the Occupy form.” The following research begins with an overview of the cycle of struggles and protest that were born out of the global revolutions in 1968. After having provided the salient features of this moment of recent political history, this text moves on to considerations of the performative turn in both the arts as well as in politics, thereby allowing for a broader critique of Modernity and for a conceptualization of what one could call as altermodernities. — a category, which obliges the theorist-researcher to reconceive of the very notion of performativity in the process. The research also defines performative event and its aesthetics in contrast to other existing literature such as social performance theory, and it goes on to argue for an aesthetics whose function is to create the conditions for alternative subjectifications. As performative politics works on the social relations to envision and enact a future society in the present, the transformations in dominant spatiotemporality – a constituent part of relationality – as well as bodies – in-between which the social relationality emerges – will be examined. The processes and mechanisms of constructing and imagining collective bodies at the national level, and how performative politics disrupts such processes of homogenization will be also an important part of evaluating the impacts and effects of occupy movements as well as how these performative movements re-appropriated time and space; creating spatio-temporalities different from the established colonial and authoritarian linear progress-centered ones reproduced by the nation-state apparatuses, particularly in the West Asia and North Africa. It will be also argued that a paradigm of imitation and mimesis will come short of explaining the communication and dissemination of protests movement from Cairo to New York, from Istanbul to Madrid, thus proposing the idea of performative contagion as a model to rethink this communication. Although this research makes use of case studies, archived material, and author led interviews with artist-activists, all of which are related to the main subject of this thesis the occupy form of protests and its predecessors, it largely remains a theoretical endeavor to use performance and theatre studies in the socio-political field, drawing its insights from the tradition of the philosophers of immanence and the thinkers of community in 20th century.

Throwing the Body into Fight: The Body as an Instrument in Political Art

The Journal of Somaesthetics Vol I / 2015: 1

Abstract: Thinking about the body in contemporary art leads easily to an exaggerated focus on extremities and excess. Beginning from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s violently radical life, and ending up in Martin Jay’s critique of Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetics, the first part of this article discusses different conceptions regarding the role of the body in art. I aspire to show the need to rearticulate the role of the body in contemporary art. In the second part of the article I will turn the focus to rather small or moderate acts of political art, where artists put themselves and their bodies at stake. My aspiration is to bridge somaesthetics to one of the major trends in contemporary art, the practice of political and social work. Through its interest in the golden mean and everyday life, somaesthetics provides a resonate philosophical frame for discussing performances and events typical for e.g. community art and political activist art, where the body, I claim, has an important, though quite unnoticed role.

Bodies Withdrawn: The Ethics of Abstraction in Contemporary Post-Minimal Art (PhD Dissertation)

This dissertation examines the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Doris Salcedo, Teresa Margolles, and Santiago Sierra, artists that redeploy the aesthetics of 1960s minimalism in relation to contemporary political crises. I argue that these artists make an important case for the political and ethical relevance of aesthetic abstraction, insofar as their work imagines forms of coexistence that resist the sovereign organization of human bodies. In each chapter, I discuss a selection of major works by an individual artist, emphasizing theoretical analyses that privilege deconstruction, bio- and necropolitical theory, and continental philosophy. I situate artistic practices in relation to their social and political contexts to consider how Gonzalez-Torres, Salcedo, Margolles, and Sierra respond to issues such as the AIDS crisis, state violence, and socio-economic subjugation. Specifically, I consider how they use minimalist formal strategies to convey the socio-political abstraction of human life and, further, to address the conditions in which certain bodies fail to appear. These artists demonstrate how the body’s disappearance produces an abstraction: not the sign of a body but the index of its withdrawal from appearance (to invoke the etymological meaning of abstrahere). By portraying the material traces of the figure’s negation, they account for the aesthetic and political challenge of presenting anonymous bodies and beings. Their work thereby inverts minimalism’s concern with the relation of objective forms to embodied viewers, in that it reveals art’s contradictory relation to inaccessible bodies. This approach carries important aesthetico-ethical ramifications: it exposes viewers to unknowable and imperceptible beings, challenging dominant ethical models based on the inter-subjective relation of autonomous individuals; hence, it illustrates an ethics of coexistence that is irreducible to subject-object binaries and to the subjectivization of embodied life.

Notes On Performance Art, The Body And The Political

When I use the term ‘political’ related to performance art, I intend to set forth a space of possible, civil negotiation for and among artists and audience to analyse and further debate on how to overcome and transform schemes, rules, conventions and barriers, socially and culturally. Curatorial text published in the post event catalogue of the second edition of the Live art exhibition project Venice International Performance Art Week "Ritual Body-Political Body" (2014) conceived and curated by VestAndPage.