[-empyre-] Second Response to Judith on Bourriaud and Foucault / "Relational Aesthetics" and "Aesthetics of Existence"

[Judith Rodenbeck]

> "Obvious" to whom?
> 
Robert, I'm afraid "obvious" was your word, not mine. And yes, we are at a
place of disagreement, perhaps of inoperability. My "rigid binary"--and I
suggest you might want to watch that YouTube rendering of a tesseract
again--suggested that practices elsewhere than the printed page of the
scholarly press might also do the work of thought. I never said "better,"
or, for that matter, "worse." But I will say this: if we are going to use
"relational aesthetics," a term that comes with a history as specific as
that of "lines of flight," let's give what it stands for (along with that
history) equal seating at our symposium. You write of Sedgwick's later
writing; on those grounds we should equally (attempt to) write of Tiravanija
(whom you mention), but also of Huyghe's early work, or Gonzalez-Torres's
adumbrations, or Parreno's perorations (all guys, btw--kind of a
problem--there are a few women, but I'm loading the dice here)--or, in a
guilty moment mention, Martha Rosler's entire fucking oeuvre. How has the
"aesthetic" realm, understood within the range of "relational aesthetics,"
thought of or about the relational? This is a story that has been told by
objects and events, from Duchamp through Kaprow through Huyghe to Sharon
Hayes and beyond, and that has always spoken to political dimensions of
that question. I'm suggesting that those "speech acts" articulated by such
art objects/events (we don't yet have an adequate or translated theorization
of them, so we borrow from the realms of language) are just as valuable as
the statements of those philosophers who have written about them.

The video of the tesseract in 6-way rotation
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7aeSGrUrKU ) is nothing special, as video
or thought. But,it's perceptually quite interesting, almost as interesting,
but in a highly reduced way, as Ernie Gehr's "Serene Velocity" (the latter
available, but completely fucked up, on YouTube). It asks you to do a
certain work of internal flipping and exchange: to distract from your own
reference points however momentarily; you can hold on to your understanding
of three-dimensional space and watch the thing project perpetually, or you
can see it flip in and out, into (to use another cheap metaphor) renaissance
perspectival and then baroque inverted space. This is how the "slapping
piece" by djlotu5 and hir collaborator works for me. I didn't like the piece
and found it disturbing, but I'm willing to articulate my discomfort (and to
engage the makers in greater detail about their interests, if they want).
Here's a question: If you've never seen a duck or a rabbit, can the
duck/rabbit effect work for you? The YouTube tesseract attempts the
visualization of time-space, and for that reason alone it becomes
interesting. (FYI, there is another attempt, here,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xN4DxdiFrs, that is ok but, well, phallic
and just not that interesting. Of note: the same figure articulates these
alternate modes.)

I'm asking you to go into that studio crit with me and to give up "winning"
as goal. 

Judith