[-empyre-] Week Two on -empyre: Matthew Brower, Chaya Litvack, and Owen Mundy

[Chaya Litvack]

Hi Everyone,

Thank you to Patrick, Selmin and Camilla for inviting me to take part in 
this month's discussion!

By way of introduction, I thought I'd return to Andrew's post on 
evidential and performative views of documents. I often find myself 
troubled by this distinction, since I think that overemphasis on either 
one perspective to the detriment of the other denies the complexity of 
the relationship between the past (or the conditions that ground the 
very possibility of present action), material traces, and documentary 
interventions. In this respect, I think that documents that teeter 
between evidence and event are particularly relevant. The scores created 
by artists affiliated with Fluxus, for example, both testify to the past 
and call out for some kind of response. So, to touch on a concern raised 
by Matt, I wonder if documenting politically charged art would be most 
effective if the documents themselves somehow destabilized interpretive 
frameworks inflected by various disciplinary and/or theoretical 
allegiances.

As for your final question, Matt, I need to mull it over...

Chaya

/Chaya Litvack, PhD Student
Faculty of Information, University of Toronto
Email: chaya.litvack at mail.utoronto.ca
/