Re: [-empyre-] What is Bare Life?

[Tina Gonsalves <tina@tinagonsalves.com>]

> Hi Aliette, Dirk and all,
>
> I think artists can adress issues related to the concept of bare life, 
> but I don't think that art is bare life.
> But there are very interesting artistic approaches to the concept and 
> its implications.
> Tina in her first statement makes that quite clear, and refers Beuys:
>
> > I enjoy Joseph Beuys comment about what it was to be an artist.  “You 
> > weren’t showing your magnificence and your wealth of ideas and your 
> > huge creativity, you were showing your vulnerability. And it was your 
> > vulnerability that people picked up on, the perception of your 
> > vulnerability as a person and as an artist that sparked the 
> > creativity in other people”.
>
> None of the guest artists (and Christina) stated (in their posts) that 
> their work is specifically about "bare life", or specifically 
> influenced by Agamben conceptual frame, but they adress questions that 
> remit to the subject of this debate.
>
> Tina, I would like to hear your opinion about this!Sorry, I have got 
> caught in work. But I have been following the posts and have wanted to 
> respond, but also feel a little intimidated by the theorizing, and 
> wonder where words sit with barelife. Actually, even in the act of 
> posting, there is some bareness - there is exposing – with send the 
> send button, it is thrown into the open, no control of 
> interpretation. It is judged, compared, ignored, misinterpreted. Maybe 
> inspires other ideas.

Sorry, I have got caught in work. But I have been following the posts 
and have wanted to respond, but also feel a little intimidated by the 
theorizing, and wonder where words sit with barelife. Actually, even in 
the act of posting, there is some bareness there is exposing – With 
send the send button, it is thrown into the open, no control of 
interpretation. It is judged, compared, ignored. Maybe inspires other 
ideas.

But on the other side, each day as an artist, I find a lot of my 
process is about stripping away, becoming bare, through images, 
technology, through sound. There is push and pull – a tension I enjoy. 
In my art, I feel more brave to explore exposure. In my process of 
creating, what resonates with me, is the feeling of being exposed, of 
stripping back, or being raw. I often correlate this feeling with a 
innate sense of ‘rightness’ for composition, form, texture,.., Its in 
that feeling of exposure where I can feel a dialogue with the work –I 
make sense of it – it reveals a meaning.

I feel exposed especially today. I am working on an interactive piece 
that looks at mirroring and empathy. I spent yesterday with the 
director of the clinical hypnosis unit who works a lot with the 
neuroscientists ( I am currently artist in resident at the Institute of 
Neuroscience, UCL). We have been working on a few projects together. I 
needed to start working on the sound of a responsive video piece that 
is about mimicry. It is quite personal. Basically, a video of my facial 
expressions mimic the movement of the audience, but if they move too 
much I start to cry, and through movement they have to work out how to 
calm me. Anyway, I needed sound, and I am very much interested in 
capturing authentic emotions, those that are stripped back from social 
conditioning. So he hypnotized me into these various emotional states. 
We recorded it all. I was nervous at the release of self control, and 
didn’t think I would be hypnotizable. But for over an hour, I felt 
these visceral strong emotions of different events in my life.. Today I 
am exhausted, and feel raw. Yesterday I found myself reliving events 
that I haven’t thought about for years. Strange, deep. I haven’t been 
able to look at the tape we recorded. Today it seems hard to pull it 
into my work. How do I now edit this? How will I fight the self 
censorship? but maybe I will feel different about it in a few days.

The act of creating work is very visceral for me, and in order to 
continue making work, I spend a bit of time investigating my own body, 
mind, and its internal processes. Over the years I have probed my body 
and mind by taking part in all sorts of things that take me out of my 
comfort zone. In some ways, the personal investigation reflected my 
artistic process. The deeper and more inward the personal journey took 
me, the more internal my work became. My emotional body becomes a big 
part of my every­day, and in those times I feel that my skin, as a 
barrier, was also breaking down. I feel more vulnerable.

So for me, in the process of creating that is when things get stripped 
bare.In my own process, I correlate exposure with a feeling of 
creativity. The exposure gives the new, the unexpected, the mistakes. 
Giving up. Letting go of preconceived ideas. The work that this process 
produces, may engage feelings of emotions in others – maybe pushing 
them to feel more deeply, to reflect, make meaning out of past 
disparate memories, present situations.

For me, the notions of ‘barelife’ lies the interest in where meaning 
comes from when everything you have used as pillars is stripped 
away.   What are the sediments, what does is look like, feel like. when 
it all gets stripped away, what are you left with.

Adorno(2002) writes, “Hegel’s thesis that art is consciousness of 
plight has been confirmed beyond anything he could have envisioned” (p. 
18). For it is in art that personal anxiety becomes politicized and 
individual emotions enter into a larger narrative of collective 
suffering that cannot be falsely massaged into the pre-packaged 
pleasures of the culture industry or the indifference of coldnessand 
hardness. Here aesthetics emerges as a moment within an overall 
pedagogical problematic centered against hyper-fascism. The arc from 
pedagogy to aesthetics resists reification of consciousness into a 
thing, opening up the subject to its own constitutive incompleteness. 
Art moves this individual process to a higher level of collective 
articulation, even if this collectivity remains forever differed in the 
aesthetic realm. But we must make it clear that for Adorno, fascism is 
not simply psychological, and as such, genocide is not the result of an 
aberrant perversion. The psychology of fascism is conditioned by the 
material relations of capitalism, and is thus the subjectivity 
necessitated by the mode of production.

Victor Frankl - Man's Search for Meaning, he says this:  "...everything 
can be taken from a man but one thing:  the last of the human freedoms 
-- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to 
choose one's own way."  (1963).

Sorry this got a bit long winded, I am not sure if it got closer to 
anything. right now I am not sure how to make sense of it – but these 
are the thoughts today.


>
Tina Gonsalves
http://www.tinagonsalves.com