[-empyre-] more on the grid

[Christiane Robbins]

Ahhh.... but that "danger" is a presumption, no?


On Nov 17, 2009, at 12:38 AM, frederic neyrat wrote:

> (by the way, R Krauss seems to be able to reject avant-gardes
> fantasies of the origin in forgetting the political aim of this
> return: when Malévitch says "je me suis transfiguré dans le zéro des
> formes", he's not stupid, he knows that he's not the inventor of the
> zero - but he has to go through it to create something (as Sherrie
> Levine definitely did it !): for the avant-gardes, zero, grid, silence
> are materials for new worlds, new forms of life, not decorative
> patterns ... at the end of the day, the problem is not the return, the
> origin, the grid, the zero, but the danger to be immersed in them, to
> not be able to leave the zero...
> all my best
> Frédéric Neyrat)
>
>
> 2009/11/16 virginia solomon <virginia.solomon at gmail.com>:
>> hi zach
>>
>> the article I was actually thinking about was her "originality of the
>> avant-garde," in which she discusses the use of the grid within  
>> historical
>> avant-garde practices. specifically, through the use of the grid in
>> modernist painting, she discusses the role that the trope of  
>> originality
>> played within the historic avant-garde, and of course she  
>> undermines that
>> trope. She discusses the grid to demonstrate the repressed quality of
>> modernism, that its championing of originality comes through an  
>> engagement
>> with a form that is a copy of a copy without an original at all (who
>> invented the grid?). she then discusses postmodernism as practices  
>> that
>> don't repress the fact that it is a copy of a copy without an  
>> original.
>> there are things to be done with copies and seriality and  
>> repetition and
>> proliferation, I think, but from a different direction than  
>> communications
>> theory that might prove productive for your project.
>>
>> in terms of taking the grid as an emblem of our time, there are  
>> interesting
>> contradictions between your discussion and location, and krauss',  
>> or more
>> accurately, the practices in which krauss locates the grid. because  
>> she is
>> locating it within formalist abstraction, which is precisely  
>> seeking to
>> distance itself from the social field in its search for autonomy  
>> and medium
>> specificity. so it is a very different kind of function, but one  
>> that I
>> think can be really productive precisely because of the infections  
>> of which
>> you speak. of course this makes me think of the general idea  
>> Infected (the c
>> in the infected is a copyright sign but I don't know how to make  
>> that in
>> gmail) series, where they did infected mondrians, duchamps,  
>> rietvelds, etc.
>> which of course also gets us back to gay related immune deficiency.
>>
>>
>> and then another question just came to me, concerning the  
>> difference between
>> being-invisible and non-being. it seems to be like there are  
>> important
>> differences between refusing to be on or taken up by the grid, and  
>> not being
>> able to access the grid. maybe this is an old question, but I think  
>> it takes
>> on nuances if we are discussing a queer practice of trying to  
>> refuse the
>> modernist, enlightenment self and thing up other forms of  
>> subjectivity
>> without simply invoking the privilege of being able to refuse.
>>
>> --
>> Virginia Solomon
>>
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>>
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C h r i s t i a n e   R o b b i n s


- J E T Z T Z E I T   S T U D I O S -

... the space between zero and one  ...
Walter Benjamin


LOS ANGELES    I    SAN FRANCISCO


" The present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to  
the original, fancy to reality,
the appearance to the essence
for in these days
  illusion only is sacred, truth profane."
Ludwig Feuerbach, 1804-1872




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