PT-Theatricality Somatic Attention Uncanny

7/27/2019 PT-Theatricality Somatic Attention Uncanny

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theatricality,somewhere inbetween empathyand the uncanny

FRIED

Not fitting the canon of Greenbergfor seeking the autonomy ofpainting

Painting is proper art

Its autonomy is itsdistinction/separation/abstractionfrom the actual (literal) spatialenvironment

Literalist work not (modern)painting , not (modern) sculptureLiteralist work then objects

paintingworks are acknowledged asobjects

BUCK-MORSS[Kant] The moral being is sense-dead from the

start.Kants trascendental subject purges himself ofthe senses that endanger his autonomy.Senses unavoidably entangle the subject in theworld, and make him susceptible to sympathyand tears.

Benjamin is saying that the sensory alienationlies at the source of the aestheticization ofpolitics, which fascism does not create, butmerely manages. We are to assume thatboth alienation and aestheticized politics asthe sensual conditions of modernity outlivefascism and thus so does the enjoymenttaken in viewing our own destruction.

Benjamin demands from artto undo the alienation of the corporealsensorium, to restore the instinctual power ofthe human bodily senses for the sake ofhumanitys self-preservation () not byavoiding the new technologies, but by passingthrough them.


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Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flatsurfaceDonald Judd (150)

I wish to emphasize that things are in a space with oneself, rather than one isin a space surrounded by things.Robert Morris (154)

Literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned withthe actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work.(153)

Literalist work makes evident the collapse of Greenbergian pictorial cannon,which required painting not to be visually illusionist and illusory

Fried exposes a different kind of illusionism, which is somatic or kinesthetic theillusion of absent presences that he names theatricality.

Presence

SizeScaleBodily proximityVisual distanceDemands to be taken intoaccount (seriously)Hollowness / Insinuatedinside

Literalist work

not strictly withinproducing a situationrelational to the beholderincluding the beholderbeholders body and not onlybeholders gazerelational to the architecture andspace

obtrusiveness and agressiveness


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PERFORMATIVE ELEMENTS DESCRIBED BY FRIED

The barriers between the arts are in the process of crumblingThe arts are sliding towards a final, implosive, desirable synthesis (164)

The experience in question persists in time, and the presentment of endlessness that,I have been claiming, is central to literalist art and theory is essentially a presentmentof endless, or indefinite, duration. (166)

Theatricality is concerned with the sense of temporality: of time both passing and tocome, approaching and receding. (167)

Audience of one

The work has been waiting for himThe work refuses to let her alone

Confronting/isolating/distancing her

Walter Benjamins understanding of modern experience is neurological. Itcenters on shock. The more readily consciousness registers these shocks, theless they are to have a traumatic effect.

Under extreme stress the ego employs consciousness as a buffer, blocking theopenness of the synaesthetic system, thereby isolating present consciousnessfrom past memory. Without the depth of memory, experience is impoverished.

The problem is that under conditions of modern shock the daily shocks ofmodern worldresponse to stimuli without thinking has become necessary forsurvival.

Perception becomes experience only when it connects with sense-memories of

the past.

(17)

BUCK-MORSS


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The body under general anaestheticsTripartite splitting of experience / three different phenomenologies

agency / bodiliness / cognition

AGENT agency the operating surgeonMATTER object as hyle the docile body of the patient

OBSERVER perceiving and acknowledging the accomplished result

EMPATHY (Susan Foster)

- Piety- contagion of the imagination- feeling anothers feelings- Compassion- Shared sensibility- Feeling into the world

Actions executed by nullificationor empathic inability:MassacreEnslavementTortureAbduction

SOMATIC ATTENTION (Csordas)

The body is a biological, material entity,while embodiment can be understoodas an indeterminate methodologicalfield defined by perceptual experienceand the mode of presence andengagement in the world.

Embodied experience is the starting pointfor analyzing human participation in acultural world.

Phenomenology considers embodimentas the existential condition in whichculture and self are grounded.

The ways we attend to and with ourbodies, and even the possibility ofattending, are neither arbitrary norbiologically determined, but are culturallyconstituted.


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Allan Kaprow

Text by Allan Kaprow in:http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen6A/pushAndPull.html


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Push and Pull. A Furniture Comedy forHans Hofmann1963

Ana Roldn


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Two long weapons without armor, 2004 My favorit antagonist, 2008

The plot of the five masquerades, 2009


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Cmico, mgico, musical, 2008

Cmico, mgico, musical, 2008


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Doris Salcedo


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Abyss, 2005brick, cement, steel and epoxyc resin

Installation: T1 Triennial of Contemporary Art, Castello di Rivoli, Turin


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Abyss, 2005brick, cement, steel and epoxyc resin

441 x 1386 x 1624 cmInstallation: T1 Triennial of Contemporary Art, Castello di Rivoli, Turin

Damin Ortega


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The Independent, 2010Installation

The Curve, London


The Curve, London


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Damin Ortega


The Curve, London


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Mike Nelson

MAGAZIN, Byk Valide Han, 2003Found space with constructed darkroom, various media

including photographs


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MAGAZIN, Byk Valide Han, 2003Found space with constructed darkroom, various media


MAGAZIN, Byk Valide Han, 2006 (Frieze Art Fair)Found space with constructed darkroom, various media



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Simon Fujiwara

Selective Memory, 2012Tate Saint Ives, Exhibition 1982


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Welcome to the Hotel Munber, 20082010Tate Saint Ives, Exhibition 1982

Mothers, of Invention(detail), 2012Tate Saint Ives, Exhibition 1982


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Buck-Morss, Susan, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin'sArtwork Essay Reconsidered in October, Vol. 62, Autumn, 1992. pp.3-41.

Csordas, Thomas J. Somatic Modes of Attention in CulturalAnthropology, Vol. 8, No. 2, May 1993. pp. 135-156.

Foster, Susan Leigh. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia inPerformance. London / New York: Routledge, 2011.

Fried, Michael Art and Objecthood (1967) in Art and Objecthood:Essays and Reviews. Illinois: University Of Chicago Press, 1998. pp.148-172.

Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the ModernUnhomely. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, 1992.

PT-Theatricality Somatic Attention Uncanny

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