Re: [-empyre-] re-delineations

[Kate Southworth <katesouthworth@gloriousninth.com>]

>> on 4/9/05 2:21, Jordan Williams at jordan@cartocorpus.com wrote:

>> How does one artistically transgress without representing - and how does one
>> represent without using some form - the body, writing, new media, the canvas
>> - that has not been born out of or appropriated by capitalism?

May be we can consider painting for a moment, and consider, in particular,
how, after 1945, painting responded to the very real politics of the
holocaust, fascism, and the trauma of war.  In a wonderful dialogue between
Griselda Pollock and Alison Rowley one of them suggests that 'Those events
fostered a discourse on the impossibility of painting in the face of
history'.

They go on to discuss Samuel Beckett's detection of a profound crisis in
painting's relation to visuality, and then on to Merleau-Ponty and his
ability to not just think about painting but to think 'with' painting.

'The painter's vision is not a view upon the outside, a merely
physical-optical relation with the world.  The world no longer stands before
him through representation,: rather it is the painter to whom the things of
the world give birth by a sort of concentration or coming-to-itself of the
visible'.  

I would suggest that relevant to this discussion here on empyre is Griselda
Pollock's suggestion that 'on the other side of the postmodern shift to new
media and new political agendas in the 1980s' what she has named 'painting
after painting after history' acquires 'an unexpected ethico-political
significance' because of this historical turn.

'Once rightly critiqued as individualistic self-promotion, painting as a
practice could now be called on to affirm what Julia Kristeva calls
'singularity' (a critical term opposed to bourgeois ideologies of
individualism)[...] Kristeva gives ethical importance to 'aesthetic
practices', drawing on aesthesis as that dimension of experience that is NOT
mediated by reason - she says Technology has now totally absorbed and
instrumentalised rationality - but by affect and a relation to the drives'.

Although it may be a more subtle and much slower process than, say, for
example, a tactical media approach, I do believe that there is a possibility
for new media arts practitioners to be really politically transgressive
through the aesthetic and emotional (together with the rational).


Ref: Alison Rowley & Griselda Pollock, 'Painting in a 'Hybrid Moment' in
Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Painting, Ed. Jonathan Harris
(Liverpool University Press + Tate Liverpool)


vbw
Kate