Saturday, April 14, 2012

Series. The Dark Whole.






Michel Foucault talks about prisons as heterotopias in his unpublished article "Of Other Spaces" (1967). Heterotopias are marginal spaces that are linked to our real everyday spaces but "act as counter-sites", privileged, sacred, forbidden places, where cultural imaginations of spatiality are contested and inverted. The Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia is such a heterotopia twice: First a heterotopia of deviation, in Foucault's terms, at the time of its (disciplinary) use, reserved for deviant individuals and their out-of-the-ordinary living. And secondly, abadoned in 1971 and kept as a "suspended ruin" ever since, the penitentiary is an urban archaelogical site where culture-tourism is performed and modern art installed. This photograph speaks to its character as a locus of panoptic viewing practices (of its past and contemporary guardians) and the tyrrany of governmental surveillance.


The scene seems to last forever – a caravaggesque rendering of some minor myth, in which the horror and splendor supersede the particulars of the obscure narrative”
—Nicholas Muellner, No Such Place
Site Specific: 'Arsenaal, completed 1682, Castle, Cape of Good Hope.

Borderline. West Coast.



"Is [the film] a form of re-performance ... that shows that it's not about the original, but about it's absence, the silhouette washed out to sea?"

Santana. Soul Sacrifice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkZgMmCE7ds&feature=related

After the fall.



Posted by Picasa

Metamorphoses. Mythopoetic Space/Change.



The case of Ana Mendieta.

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/news/2010-10-12/ana-mendieta/
http://www.alisonjacquesgallery.com/artists/47/works/
https://www.google.com/search?q=images+ana+mendieta&hl=en&rls=com.microsoft:en-za:IE-Address&prmd=imvnso&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=qteJT9jiOYaHhQfU6LzJCQ&ved=0CCQQsAQ&biw=1366&bih=622

Photo Essays. Liminal Spaces.






Exploring human creativity -Terra Incognita - gravitas of becoming.

Liminality in Art
 http://www.amazon.com/The-Postmodern-Condition-Knowledge-Literature/dp/0816611734

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/arts/design/08bloo.html
http://peterandjoan.blogs.wm.edu/2008/09/19/the-liminal-space/
http://peterandjoan.blogs.wm.edu/2009/03/11/barbara-kruger-a-room-with-a-view/
http://www.barbarakruger.com/
This is meant to be an attempt in coining a new term in the Art Theory field.
Curiously enough, the term Liminality continues not to be recognised by the modern dictionaries of English; even though numerous (stated below) researchers have been using it in academic papers. It doesn’t exist as an aesthetic concept or any distinguished phenomenon in the contemporary fine art. Yet, what I would like to claim and what is the reason of this article is my knowledge that this very notion has been persistently influencing the way of defining and interpreting art of the last decades at least. Though never or very rarely (in its adjective form of the liminal) applied as such by the art critics and scholars it has been circulating in the air each time the hybridity, borderline qualities, formlessness or intersemiotics of the Postmodernism has been loathed or admired.
From Latin limen meaning threshold ‘liminality’ is an existential (metaphysical) subjective, state and realm of hovering ‘between and betwixt’ of two (or more) different planes, spaces and/or existential qualities. First described in anthropology (Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner) as a social theory of the liminal states – spaces of a ‘temporary outcast’ when an individual or a group is being placed by the society on its margin in a ritual of purification and/or recognition. It has got also its usage in the contemporary psychology where the liminal means sub- or unconscious state with one’s sense identity being ‘hold’ or dissolved to some extent. In contemporary philosophy J. Derrida  has been called the ‘philosopher of the liminal’ due to his deconstruction attempts of the integral and solid tissue of materiality (more about it in the next parts of this series).
In visual art the ‘threshold’s ‘ aesthetics has been described on the theatre, cinema and performance field (notably S. Zizek, S. Broadhurst) and some curatorial and critical attempts has been made to embrace the liminality of the contemporary artistic expression done by more or less traditional media. Yet, it’s basically the ‘no man’s land’ when painting or sculpture is considered – those realms remain, for the today’s critique and theory (and not surprisingly, by any means) immune to any ‘revolutionary’ ‘new’ aesthetic refurbishment; it became a sort of an ideological cliche – that it’s more convenient to blame painting for its impotency (it’s ‘dead’ anyway, why bother then?…) than to inject any potent conceptual spirit into it by an affirmative reflection.
When J-F. Lyotard has called Postmodernity the nascent state, the state of a permanent ‘becoming’ (The Postmodern Condition, 1979) he basically admitted its innate liminal character; and those artworks that seek to address this condition (both deliberately or not) are probably best recognised for their aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics) of incompleteness – sculptures/installations look as if the artist ran out of the materials to finish them to a decent level; paintings seem to be painfully ‘hanged’ by their own guts with indescribable forms, unidentifiable colours and freaky techniques; videos cry out for any structure, even a hint of a narrative. Their ‘becomingness’ is the only existence they know and it comes invariably as disquieting or even disturbing for the audience. No without a reason the primitive societies considered the liminal states as dangerous, unclean (Turner); and those affected were isolated ‘pro publico bono’.
As hazardous and monstrous in moments as the liminality in art (and beyond it) seems to appear it is also probably the only truly creative state, which – if used wisely – can result in some profound discoveries and metamorphoses. This fructile chaos and the storehouse of possibilities (Turner) is a goldsmith’s workshop of the contemporary art; even though some purists rise an alarm that the state of the constant flux and indeterminacy (where ‘everything goes’) will annihilate all the miserable bits of art that left – let’s be positive… Art is best cared for if it’s accepted just as it appears and shapes itself through the mill of the human spirit; even if refuses to ‘become’ and fit any new uniform – so what?… As far as  minds and hearts are enflamed by it, even with a doubt, even with a turmoil – it fulfills its calling of the ‘fifth element’ – the force of life and death, possibility and danger, sanctus and profane.
http://www.amazon.com/Society-Spectacle-Guy-DEBORD/dp/0934868077/ref=pd_sim_b_3
http://www.amazon.com/The-Order-Things-Archaeology-Sciences/dp/0679753354/ref=pd_sim_b_5