Locating the Experimental Novel in Erasure and The Water Cure (original) (raw)
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Efforts of epoché and play, MFA THESIS: WRITTEN
This thesis paper self-critiques the graduate printmaking studies and Thesis Exhibition, "Efforts of epoché and play," of Jaclyn Stephens, MFA Miami University. For both maker and viewer, the art installation experience is created for sensory play, actively denying conclusion in order to perceptually experience the initial moments and process of creating understanding. This perceptual 'net' (Stephens' specification of epoché) is academic in explanation, but primitive and instinctual in experience. Time, body, mind, multi-media, interaction, installation, process, work, and play are metaphorical and descriptive employments of the art and work critiqued.
Roczniki humanistyczne, 2017
There are many ways in which the term experiment may be used with reference to art and, in particular, the novel. Most commonly the term is used for innovative techniques employed in artefacts. But artistic experiment may also consist in (1) the reader using artefacts to evoke her aesthetic response and enhance thereby her introspective potential, (2) the author (and the reader) exploring in the mode of fiction how real people might behave in certain situations, (3) the reader testing upon herself a hypothesis inscribed in the novel’s design. In this paper, the theoretical considerations are illustrated with an in-depth study of Bukaczewski’s Onde estas? as well as a brief discussion of other contemporary novels.
More than material: art and the incorporeality of the event
Studies in Material Thinking vol 16, 2016
Rethinking material relations has enabled writing on art to focus on the work of the work of art, what it does, and its material operations that acknowledge matter's potential force and dynamics. An influential contributor to these discussions has been the feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, whose 2008 book, Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth, offers new approaches for thinking about the way art enables matter to become expressive. More recently Grosz has argued for an understanding of incorporeality that encompasses both ideality and materiality. Her recent writings suggest a relation between sense, signification and materiality in which sense is not in opposition to matter, but a shared surface of the incorporeal and the material. Through a discussion of Scott Mitchell's New Millennium Fountain, this paper will examine the seemingly paradoxical understanding of sense Grosz advocates as a challenge to thinking about the sense making properties of artworks.
Theater between art and experiment
Theatrical Colloquia
These few pages want to shed some light on the differences that exist between theatrical performance and experimental creative act. The fundamental notions that define the human being, in general, and the artistic entity in particular, are debated and evidence is provided about the importance of man in time and space. At the same time, the focus falls on knowledge as an essential factor in the evolution of the individual, on his ability and desire to explore expression through his own body, on the complexity of theatrical art perceived as forming culture and on the path of trials that contemporary society is going through. The argumentation is based on reference studies and includes personalities such as Konstantin Stanislavski, Michael Chehov, Brook, Étienne Decroux, precisely to emphasize that not every experiment or form of artistic expression can become art and constitute a theatrical performance.
2012
Critical Theory demands that its forms of critique express resistance to the socially necessary illusions of a given historical period. Yet theorists have seldom discussed just how much it is the case that, for Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, the concepts and language it employs, as well as the aesthetic comportment it would champion for the sake of generating a critical distance from these illusions, require an understanding of the mimetic faculty. The point of departure for this work is thus an attempt to delineate both the essential and the historical features of this faculty, in the hope of understanding the conditions under which the force of critique can truly find language today. With this is in view, I illustrate the manner in which these features of mimesis, namely its semblance (Schein) and play (Spiel) character, are initially at work in our experiential relation to nature, but are ultimately subject to a violent taboo that wrenches us from nature and thereby wages a desperate battle against the attempt to give voice or call a halt to the unnecessary suffering of an antagonistic historical circumstance. This shows that there is a dialectic of enlightenment built into the comportment of mimesis itself, that latent within it is the simultaneous potential for progress and regression. More specifically, it shows that mimesis is, as it were, banished from an immediate absorption with nature, and, therefore, needs to migrate into the neutralized and sorrowful (traurig) sphere of art-the sole refuge within which the outermost consequences of mimetic development are granted full expression. Parallel to the Kantian category of philosophical-ideas,‖ I, accordingly, argue that the recognition of this immanent struggle to end myth is synonymous with a mimesis awakened to a regulative striving after the idea of peace or reconciliation, i.e., a striving that, if realized, would at last assuage the hostility between rationality and mimesis, concept and intuition. Mimesis is thus, on the one hand, capable of sensing the material trace or hearing the musical echo stored up in the unreconciled state of language. But if, on the other hand, it becomes dislodged from the sensitivity that-reads‖ with and against the tempo of its material circumstance, it could just as well disavow precisely the possibility of this peace and thus regress to a catastrophic form of instrumental rationality. By virtue of immersing itself in the most minute details of the present historical constellation, exposing the falsehoods involved in, for instance, the harmony of traditional beauty, or the triumphalism and sovereignty of the traditional sublime, I argue that mimesis not only marks an indispensable moment in the dynamic movement of critique, it also brings to the fore the pressing need for a materialist conception of aesthetics.
Literary Herald: An International Refereed/Peer-reviewed English e-Journal, 2024
This paper aims to investigate the notion of 'existential conundrum' which arises due to the dichotomy of illusion and reality and stands as an overanxious attitude in the metatheatrical play ―Six Characters in Search of an Author‖ by Luigi Pirandello. The study analysed various texts, biographies and articles and reached to the understanding that the human psyche faced the dilemma and therefore it becomes difficult to interpret the innate detail of the psyche which the characters on the stage were trying to locate for themselves in order to look back at them in terms of identity as only being present on the stage does not make them characters, but actors playing characters. And therefore, they do not have their proper settled identity in reality or in illusion and so this marks the uneasy feeling of the characters who are constantly in search of author as Pirandello pokes fun on the genre and on author who are the two very important sections of a play. The paper employs exploratory, participatory and qualitative research method. The study has been taken forward from a varied perspective. The research done in this paper is an authentic contribution, as the paper intends to unfold by posing questions about traditional ideas of identity, reality, and truth in pieces and invites viewers and readers to go on an existential and self-exploration trip of the human psyche. The findings provide a promising future for this study that bring out appropriate solution and tend to complete the research gap. The research findings in the play mention about the deep understanding of the intricacies of human life which never ceases to captivate and uplift readers everywhere. Thus, this frames question on the theatrical tradition and provides significant new perspectives on human nature enlightening the new prism of study.
The International Journal of Arts Theory and History, 2023
The fragmentary nature of the aesthetic in Artaud lies in its intensity and trauma. As found in his invented language, recorded utterances, drawings of portraits, hieroglyphic texts, and an irregular cadence of his recorded voice-most of which are exquisitely captured in the Artaud Diptych-this article not only seeks the connection to what is described as forms of "language" and the sublime but also informs the privation communicated in the embodied works of Artaud. As such, Artaud is approached within selected theories of the sublime, presented genealogically and interwoven with praxis, exemplified through the plays of two Greek playwrights, Ioli Andreadi and Aris Asproulis. The performances of Artaud Diptych give us that which embodies an Artaudian engagement with the sublime. The argument herein is that the sublime emanates from various aspects of the writing, imagery, and aural qualities immanent to the Artaudian oeuvre. While Artaud's venture into theater writing may be considered a failed experiment, this article shows how he achieved a singularity in the self-transformative process (and as an avenue of self-preservation), using language as word, imagery, and sound, as affective agents toward the sublime, ultimately operating within a mode of intersubjectivity. In the translation of his oeuvre toward theater and the audience, we discover the ultimate success of his intersubjective work as performative philosophy, as revealed by the Artaud Diptych by Ioli Andreadi and Aris Asproulis.
From Watching to Reading – Theorizing a Performative Manuscript
This article seeks to discuss the reciprocal relation between art practice and theorization process. I will examine the performance, “Current of Air”, which employs the structural strategy of a time-based “reading”, a performance book. The audience experiences scenes according to chapters. Each chapter aims to bring up a certain theoretical question between theatre performance and new media. These questions are expressed through an experimental art practice – performative installation. This practice intends to shift the audience from passively “watching” to a more pedagogic “reading”. In the final scene of this performance, audience members physically enter the performance-installation space. They continue their contemplations by immersing themselves in the media-driven installation set and enter into dialogues with artists from the production. Within the whole performance/ reading process, a deeper exchange between affective / intuitive feeling and intellectual thinking is observed. I assert that the role of spectator/audience as one of the crucial site for bridging art and scholarship. The discussion of spectatorship will follow Jacques Lacan’s notion on “Orders of Reality”, i.e., Real, Imaginary and Symbolic as well as Gilles Deleuze’s theory on “Purpose of Thinking”. “Current of Air” is an attempt to integrate the roles of spectator/ audience and book reader. This kind of artistic-intellectual work deepens the Theory and Art Practice connection and shows the importance of examining spectatorship in relation to Theory-Practice.
2021
This essay attempts through extended textual exegesis to clarify two fundamental concepts in late Adorno’s metaphysical and philosophical-aesthetic writings respectively: “metaphysical experience” and the “riddle-character” of art. The first part of the essay explores how in Negative Dialectics Adorno reworks certain Kantian themes to provide an account of metaphysical experience as the exercise of the mind’s capacity for thinking beyond the immanently given that brings happiness despite failing to attain the absolute. The second part of the essay interprets concepts from Aesthetic Theory and related writings, including the internal/external, performative/cognitive perspectives on the artwork, and its similarity to language, to show how the riddle-character of art elicits an experience similar to metaphysical experience, in that it demonstrates the ability of mind to reach beyond its cognitive selflimitations into a response-dependent objectivity with utopian implications.