Political Incarnation as Living Archive: Thinking with 'L' in a Revolutionary Time (original) (raw)

Lygia Clark, the Paris Years: The Body as Medium and Material

The Aesthetics of Matter. Modernism, the Avant-Garde, and Material Exchange, 2013

This chapter considers how the matter and materials of visual art practice are radically expanded by the Brazilian artist, Lygia Clark. In particular, I focus on Clark's participatory works made in the late 1960s and early 70s while she was living in Paris. These works, or "propositions" as she called them, involved mundane substances such as: plastic sheets, stones, plastic bags, cloth, and vegetable nets.1 Clark described her propositions as about "the suppression of the object".2 This characterisation suggests a close affinity with conceptual art and its dematerialisation of the art object, often understood as an attack upon traditional art materials and methods of art production. The term "dematerialisation" was coined by Lucy Lippard and John Chandler in 1968, to account for two ways in which the traditional art object was dissolved: art as idea and art as action. In the first version, they argue, "matter is denied, as sensation has been converted into concept" -this is the most familiar description of conceptual art.3 With the second version of dematerialisation they propose that art has been transformed into "energy and time-motion".4 This second kind of dematerialisation includes performance and body art. Art as action is an apt way of describing many of Clark's works from the 1960s. Indeed, Clark's work has been classified as akin to conceptual art, most notably through her inclusion in the "Global Conceptualism" exhibition of 1999.5 Clark's participatory works, however, do not adhere to the anti-aesthetic, anti-expressive protocols that inform and constrain late modern North American art movements, such as minimalism and conceptual art. Her works intensify aesthetic experience by directly involving the body of the beholder. In fact, her participatory works require the actual body of the beholder to produce the work of art. Unlike much

Embodiment and Corporeality in Feminist Theory (Editorial of special issue)

"I was trying to capture my shock on waking, when I went out of the tent and realised that after the blizzard last night it had been transformed into a pile of snow. I'm mainly surprised that I was able to cope with the winter, even though it wasn't easy at all. The photograph reminds me of everything I went through in this tent. Winter, the fire in the tent, when I almost got stuck inside, and also how the girls from Jako doma (Homelike) helped me find a new tent after the fire." A tent almost buried in snow, provisional, and yet the only available and permanent housing. Inside it everything a person can own when they own almost nothing. The photograph speaks loudly about embodiment, corporeality, and bio-social precarity, even though what might seem to link the photograph to the subject of this issue is missing from it: the body. This issue devoted to feminist thought on embodiment and corporeality opens with a cover photograph authored by Helena Kracíková when she, along with other women without a home, but with a camera, documented the world around them over the course of three years and thus created a project called My World without a Home. And Helena Kracíková is also the author of the words prefacing this editorial. In many ways Kracíková's photograph is not just a comment on current directions in feminist theory of embodiment and corporeality. It also leads us to reflect on notions and conceptualisations of the body, materiality, and embodied becoming that resist the simple substantivisation of the body. That the expected reference point is ostensibly 'voided' is not an invitation to abstraction, not an invitation to vacate or displace the material body. On the contrary, it opens up room to reflect on material corporality through its relationship to its surroundings – for example, to reflect on how the concept of the body changes in relation to the objects that become part of our corporeality and bodily experience (like the snow-covered crutch poised in front of the tent in the photograph) or in relation to the other bodies that care for us, that help us to survive, that desire, that we touch.

LIMINALITY IN THE INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BODILY IN CONTEMPORARY ART - PhD Thesis - SUMMARY

LIMINALITY IN THE INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BODILY IN CONTEMPORARY ART , 2021

The dissertation at hand is approached with a profound understanding and reverence for the vast scope and intricacy of the subject that is the focus of this research. The multidimensional nature of the interpretations of the body in contemporary art, as a subject of analysis, gives rise to a complex and dynamic structure that can be defined as a zone of registration, parameterization, and systematisation - the very edge. It begs the question, is there a clear boundary to the corporeal, or can we only consider liminality as a recognizable drive or a need for articulation and interpretation? The spectrum of interpretations encompasses somatic and even visceral experiences beyond our awareness, through objectification, and culminates in levels of abstraction such as schema, symbol, sign, number, and the many nuanced iterations in between. The theses espoused in this dissertation are formulated from the presumption that the perceived complexity of the relationship to the corporeal in art cannot be subjected to definitive generalisations or categorizations. Rather, it endeavours to mark the boundary which oscillates between uncertainty and ambiguity, the zone that resists unambiguous definition or signification, and where the use and presence of the body and the corporeal in contemporary art are defined. A thorough analysis of the subject necessitates the excavation of the historical context and arriving at an understanding of the fragmented nature of the body in art. This approach also enables us to identify potential directions for the development of the subject. An in-depth study of the interpretations of the corporeal in contemporary art cannot be separated from the philosophical discourse of the body, the understanding of social phenomena, and identity formation, and the scientific domain of physics. It demands that we examine the physicality of bodies and the physiology thereof, as they are sensually perceived. When considering the "body" as an abstraction, its schematic representation becomes a defining characteristic of its status quo within the existing social structure and values. This tendency to view the body as a generalised quantity is critical in the disregard of its properties and specificities. The variety of states and aspects of the corporeal and the uncertainty of the body are often marginalised within a social context, making the unconventionality of corporeality inapplicable to the general socio-cultural and aesthetic status of the body. The discourse related to the question of the body inevitably leads to ambivalent concepts, resulting in a transgressive entropic structure of the paradigm. The artistic approach to the corporeal serves as a means of marking the field of research, which is closely linked to the research process itself as an indirectly determined, latent experience. My work on the subject of inquiry aims to explore the potential overflow of essences from object to subject, the capacity to distinguish and allocate moral categories to subjective sensations. In this sense, the body can be perceived as a correlation; it is accessible only outside of itself—a state of indeterminacy and unconventionality. These aspects of the "body," which do not conform to "convention," enable it to be viewed as a mental resource that is consumable in a transgressive form of "ekphrasis"—a record of an indeterminate material in an intermediate state. An essential element of my dissertation work involves my artistic exploration of the subject, which interprets, through a series of works, the body's reflection in relation to ethical categories and social prejudices. The image of the body, through its dialectical categorization, is inherently limited to a linguistic convention, considered at the limit where the transformation from one state of matter to another occurs- an allegory that is disconnected from its original form, akin to a reflection of a reflection. In order to ensure the representativeness of the present study, it is imperative to examine instances of artistic interpretations concerning the body and corporeality, specifically within the spectrum in which the body transitions from being a means to an object of art. The mechanism of synergistic interaction, known as logos-iconos, is crucial to the focus of the present study, as it possesses a distinct and inherent connection with bodily qualities. In the field of visual arts, this mechanism is observable when art is created by, through, with, and at times, within the body. The array of paradigms, or theoretical tools, available to comprehend knowledge about the body within contemporary art is endless, contingent upon the way in which the body is perceived in its independent state, prior to its classification within thought categories. Thus, assertions of a universal paradigm related to the body are implausible, as approximations of the artistic experience to specific contexts are instead more applicable. Within contemporary art, interpretations of the corporeal and its boundaries or parameters, i.e., whether they exist or not, represent further questions. Singular or plural, whole or composite, the varied applications of corporeality within art form a primary concern of the dissertation in terms of predicting the future directions of the relationship between contemporary art and the corporeal.

" …my insides were like a house… " A Study of Body and Space in Mercè Rodoreda's Diamond Square

The present thesis is a study of how body and space interrelate in the novel La Plaça del Diamant (1962) by the Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda (1908-1983). I will in the following argue that these relations are important effects of the literary form of LPD (=La Plaça del Diamant) and study how they produce a certain form of subjectivity. The analysis is generated by the following questions: how are the textual differences, translations, transitions and cancellations between the domains of body and space made readable by LPD? Centering on these questions, what will be studied more specifically in LPD is: • The practice of naming (and re-naming) and its implications for subject formation • The construction of bodily perception through spatial signs • The aesthetic strategies used for the inscription of a female experience and corporeality • Stylistic aspects of fragmentation • The Diamond Square as threshold chronotope and producer of a subject in crisis The analysis is underpinned by a materialistic, feminist and critical theory, in which the literary text is seen as a discursive act that generates certain conditions for a subject to take form. The method of study consists in a deconstructive and performative reading of LPD, based on the view on the literary text as an event between aesthetic and socio-historical elements that materialize (and question) the conditions of subject formation. Previous research has argued that the main character of LPD undergoes a progressive development during the course of the story – that she in the beginning is naïve and passive to then become a free and active subject in the end. I will however try to formulate an alternative reading of Rodoreda’s novel; a reading that will question Western-liberal accounts of subjects as freely choosing, autonomous agents and instead search for the formal and discursive conditions of LPD that render certain subjects legible. The emphasis is to study how the novel deconstructs and challenges a homogeneous notion of the subject – through its use of various stylistic, narrative and symbolic devices – and how it thus problematizes the very concept of identity.

Interview with Liliane Louvel for Feminist interventions in Intermedial Studies

2017

As Karen Jacobs points out in her introduction to your Poetics of the Iconotext (2011), your analytical take is worthy of the attention of scholars of illuminated medieval manuscripts and hypertext enhanced digital e-books alike. Yours is certainly a kaleidoscopic methodology that fuses insights from art criticism with those of phenomenological philosophy, the psychology of perception and the physiology of vision to explain the reading/viewing experience in terms of Greco-Roman myths of representation that are applicable to both old and new literary and visual media. Yet are there any major differences in the iconotextual poetics of old and new media? Liliane Louvel: I think new virtual digitally produced documents or screen shots will have a strong influence on people and as a consequence on literary works, as people will become used to looking at screens on which a poly/intermedial 'spectacle' will increasingly be presented to them. 'Ekphrasis in Our Digital Age' was the subject of a workshop in Berlin. And under the aegis of Renate Brosch (University of Stuttgart), we are preparing a special issue for Poetics Today which will be dedicated to this subject. In the special issue I try to define types of ekphrasis and see to what extent iconotextual poetics has to adapt to new media, although the main features of the former theory are still valid. Inter/polymediality and using non-physically present documents, i.e. a compound of text and image, is now at everyone's fingertips. This is in addition to its being used to create swiftly changing images that are even synchronised with sound, music, which makes intermedial productions out of them. Likewise, in the phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) of reader/ spectator's response, perception remains crucial to analysing new types of visually oriented works. I also think that cognition and the new paths it offers may come in handy to explain the brains and the impact of IT-oriented works and the IT era. Anna Kérchy and Catriona McAra: Your theoretical argumentation willingly embraces metaphors that are connected to female embodiment. These include 'the pregnant moment' , 'the maternal model of metapictoriality' , 'the maternal mode of generating images'. Can you expand on the place of the (represented/representing) body throughout the iconotextual interpretation process? Could corporeal narratology and text/image theory mutually complement one another's methodological apparatuses? Liliane Louvel: I do think that the role of the body has been ignored too much by literary poetics at large. The dynamics of reading must take into account the reader's response: the reader has to be attentive to her [sic] own reaction while reading/seeing a literary text in her mind, what I call the 'pictorial third' in my latest book Le tiers pictural (PUR, 2010) and