[-empyre-] Form, exposure, receiving

[Terry Hargrave <thargrav@alum.mit.edu>]

In your  synopsis of "mechanisms of exposure"  (Maria and David) you write:
will you be there, have
you been there
where you were exposed
into the different notion
of space, sense
Through your very presence.
Through colour that uncovers the interchanges of place [language] / space
[body]
and transposes the time."

Are you speaking of an exposure to a kind of uncovering through
visualization?  Is the ''you " in  the sentences a "you" of a digital
subjective presence, a subject that waits for realization as a visual
entity? Both as identity, and presence? One wonders if the digital space of
Mechanisms of Exposure is itself a subject that we address, like the painter
does before the landscape.  Is there an ellipsis or elision to  the little
dialog  (below)  from a recent John Berger essay?  ("Steps Towards a Small
Theory of the Visible,")  --do your mechanisms of exposure  work like the
painter's (possibly violent) reception of  the subject?


>From John Berger: 

"How did you become what you visibly are? asks the painter.

I am as I am. I'm waiting, replies the mountain or the mouse or the child.

What for?

For you, if you abandon everything else.

For how long?

For as long as it takes.

There are other things in life.

Find them and be more normal.

And if I don't?

I'll give you what I've given nobody else, but it's worthless; it's simply
the answer to your useless question.

Useless?

I am as I am.

No promise more than that?

None. I can wait forever.

I'd like a normal life.

Live it and don't count on me.

And if I do count on you?

Forget everything and in me you'll find?me!

The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on goodwill: more
usually on desire, rage, fear, pity, or longing. The modern illusion
concerning painting (which postmodernism has done nothing to correct) is
that the artist is a creator. Rather he is a receiver. What seems like
creation is the act of giving form to what has been received."


-Terry