[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 167, Issue 2

Mon Nov 12 01:22:33 AEDT 2018

Kate: "What fascinates me here is the intersection of multiple temporal
vectors: A personal, phenomenological experience of passage, a continuous
reassessment of authoritative historical narratives and momentous
encounters with seemingly universal timescales that go beyond human
experience. Works of art allow us viewers to variously “inhabit” these
temporal vectors by focusing experience on a specific set of aesthetic
conditions."

Yes, I'm very interested in the multiple temporalities intertwined within
cinematic duration. What does this mean for the relation between the
duration of the film and that of the world? In my current book project,
"Luminous Flesh, Haunted Futures: The Visible and Invisible World of
Chinese Cinemas," I argue that in *The Visible and the Invisible,*
Merleau-Ponty extends his charismatic intertwining of the flesh of the
world to the duration of time. In the unfinished work, there's a line "past
and present are Ineinander [intertwining], each enveloping enveloped, and
that itself is the flesh." Merleau-Ponty gives multiple references to the
duration of the past, expressed in terms of  light and world, for example,
the enigmatic note "Rays of Past/ of world."  I extend Merleau-Ponty's
question "Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world,
since the world is flesh?" to the perforated limits between the flesh of
the world and the cinematic flash of the world. Rather than cinema being a
delayed representation of a past moment or a given reality, it can then be
read as a virtualisation of time that is not any less real.

I'm inspired by the scene from Tsai Ming Liang's *Goodbye, Dragon Inn *
(2003)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHMxMJ6qkOU (43 second mark here)

In the scene of the rays and shadows of the cinematic world of King
Hu's *Dragon
Inn *(1967)  falling on the skin of the Ticket Lady that forms the
cinematic world enacted within Fuhe Grand Theater, that is then screened
for the audience of *Goodbye, Dragon In*n, who are themselves embedded
within the flesh of the world—what we see then is an amplification of not
only philosophy in motion but also the materialisation of a fleshly
duration.

On Thu, Nov 8, 2018 at 8:56 PM Kate Brettkelly <kate.brettkelly at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 1. Maybe there is also such a thing as mountain time that's inhabited and
> experienced differently by people attracted to mountains for the
> sublime/universal time or as in Chiang's film, for the duration of survival
> 2. In this case, duration itself might be running still and flowing deep
> but not in the sense of 'movement' or 'perspectival depth.'
>
> With respect to Liz’s contributions, I’m so pleased this conversation has
> touched on the work of Hou Hsiao Hsien - a filmmaker whose lengthy,
> durational scenes has inspired my own research.
>
> What fascinates me here is the intersection of multiple temporal vectors:
> A personal, phenomenological experience of passage, a continuous
> reassessment of authoritative historical narratives and momentous
> encounters with seemingly universal timescales that go beyond human
> experience. Works of art allow us viewers to variously “inhabit” these
> temporal vectors by focusing experience on a specific set of aesthetic
> conditions.
>
> The NZ-based art collective Local Time have achieve this by focusing
> aesthetic experience on the act of drinking water. They serve exhibition
> visitors glasses of fresh spring water drawn from the Horotiu stream – a
> significant historical resource for indigenous Maori peoples of Auckland –
> that has been paved over and now runs beneath the roads of Auckland’s
> central business district. Local Time approach this as a gesture of
> hospitality, but I’m wondering if visual arts such as this offer a special
> means of implicating viewers/experiencers in durational passages that are
> ‘unknown’ to them. Is there such thing as subversive experience of
> duration? How might this relate to the survival of subjugated histories and
> natural phenomena that have been “paved over” by dominant ideologies? So
> many thoughts!
>
> - Kate
>
> On Thu, 8 Nov 2018 at 15:00, Timothy Conway Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Elizabeth Wijaya wrote  "On Kate's point on deep time and the danger of
>> obscuring/forgetting
>> historical subjugation and social inequality,  maybe there is also such a
>> thing as mountain time that's inhabited and experienced differently by
>> people attracted to mountains for the sublime/universal time or as in
>> Chiang's film, for the duration of survival."
>>
>> Something I've been discussing with artists and students over the past
>> couple of months are the traversals and transversals of duration as
>> cross-inhabited by differing populations and by differing epistemologies.
>> While nature frequently has been figured vis à vis the "sublime" or the
>> "universal," its understanding remains contingent on the populations
>> inhabiting it.  Just as "understanding" itself carries the footprint of
>> historically fraught philosophical traditions.  For Liz's cinematic
>> characters, habitation runs contrary to the inhibitions of constrained
>> passage and labor.  Flight itself is both liberatory and terroristic
>> depending on whether the look goes backward or forward.  But in this case,
>> the artistic engine still might remain to be tied to "projection" in
>> relation to "distance" or "distancing."  I'm wondering whether this isn't a
>> peculiarly cinematic condition, one that signals the historical discussion
>> of the gaze in all of its complexities.  Might Chiang's cinematography and
>> still off something different?
>>
>> Along the lines of plastic arts, I'm also wondering whether the
>> counter-to-deep time of indigenous art might not signal something different
>> both in apparatus and epistemology? In this case, duration itself might be
>> running still and flowing deep but not in the sense of 'movement' or
>> 'perspectival depth.'  Just a thought provoked by Kate and Liz's posts.
>>
>> Tim
>>
>> Timothy Murray
>> Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
>> http://cca.cornell.edu
>> Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
>> http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu <http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
>> Professor of Comparative Literature and English
>>
>> B-1 West Sibley Hall
>> Cornell University
>> Ithaca, New York 14853
>>
>>
>>
>> On 11/7/18, 1:16 PM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on
>> behalf of Elizabeth Wijaya" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> on behalf of ew388 at cornell.edu> wrote:
>>
>>     ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
> _______________________________________________
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