Re: from Tim Murray (Re: [-empyre-] Holbein thread)

[eugenie <eugenies@onetel.net.uk>]

tim, 

thanks for your post .... i don't have time to reply at length right now -
i'm about to get on a plane for sydney - but i would very much like to
continue this thread. i think we're making similar arguments about the
affective/anamorphic aspect of digital enviroments, and we both seem to be
tracing a different history than the painting-cinema-VR trajectory that
seems to predominate... but since i'm going to be discussing this in my
playing paper next week i don't want to give too much away just yet!


>"The Ambassadors ... suggests that the
> ultimate strength of performance lies in the play of perspectives
> sensitizing spectators to the choices framing their own libidinal and
> ideological representation of aesthetic objects.  In moving their bodies
> to enact the perspectival options of The Ambassadors, the viewers transfer
> art from canvas to spectatorial and performative space, thus realizing the
> side- and split-visions of aesthetic oscillation.  The end here is not to
> present a sanitized image of the art of colonialization, but rather to
> provide memory traces of the differences enacted by visual immmigration
> and its supplementary libidinal and material vanishings."

absolutely. what's amazing about holbein's painting, in other words, is that
he draws attention to the agency in/of the corporeal, rather than confining
it to the discursive. i've argued elsewhere that the same sort of thing goes
on in c18th english landscape gardens - which is what i was originally
researching when i began my PhD.

gotta run - i'll have plenty more time to think about this on the plane!

eugenie