[-empyre-] Meillassoux / Harman / Kosuth

[Jon Ippolito]

Hi Simon,

As I'm sure you know, Kosuth's essay "Art After Philosophy" seemed to imply a platonic solution to that conundrum. His essay claims what's important about chairs (and art) is the unique idea conveyed to us by their varying manifestations, whether dictionary definition, photo, or wooden furniture.

I had the opposite impression standing in front of One and Three Chairs. What struck me--and indeed seemed highlighted by the work's presentation--was how different each of the versions were, and how ludicrous it seemed to pretend details like the smell of wood, the pale black-and-white print, and the dictionary typeface were just incidental projections of the same "higher" concept into our reality.

When I mentioned the disparity between what I saw in his work and what he wrote in "Art After Philosophy," Kosuth told me to "forgive the immature proclamations of a 23-year-old" or something to that effect.

Occasionally people view the variable media paradigm as similarly platonic--an approach to preservation that only applies to conceptual art. But just as One and Three Chairs is about the differences that inevitably emerge among difference instances of the same concept, so media and performative artworks are never the same from one viewing to another.

I think Euro-ethnic culture needs more practice accepting difference. One of the few useful nuggets I've gleaned from Jacques Lacan (via Joline Blais) is his division of the world into theory (Lacan's "symbolic"), what we take for real (Lacan's "imaginary"), and what we don't realize we are leaving out (Lacan's "real").

I like to lob this self-damning formulation at philosophers who busy themselves nailing down ontologies in their head instead of nailing down shingles on an ecovillage home somewhere.

OK, back to building my own ecovillage on the coast of Maine.

jon
http://MaineCohousing.org

Simon wrote:
> Kosuth's chair engaged the simulacra - it addressed conventional notions of the real as not sustainable. Kosuth's chair is an equivocal chair, a fuzzy chair, all types of chair - and never a chair. It's a conundrum, and that was the point.