Interviews with Massimo Cacciari and Franco Rella
(2015)
author(s): Andrea Pagnes
published in: Research Catalogue
Two conversations I had with eminent philosophers and thinkers Massimo Cacciari and Franco Rella on aesthetics, contemporary art and art theory issues in the mid 90s. The interviews are in Italian language as in origin.
In Conversation with Ron Athey
(2015)
author(s): Andrea Pagnes
published in: Research Catalogue
This recent conversation I have had with Ron Athey, one of the most outstanding ground-breaking performance artists of our times, has been made exclusively for LADA (Live Art Development Agency, UK) on early 2015. The agency, on behalf of its director Lois Keidan, is pleased to make it available for Research Catalogue members and readers.
The dialogue includes a discussion around the issues and concerns of contemporary Performance Art as well as an in-depth focus on the work of Ron Athey, past and present. With additional notes by Lisa Newman, a photo selection from the archive of the artist and Manuel Vason's, and Athey's "Devine's Funeral" monologue, originated from Jean Genet's novel "Our Lady of the Flowers".
Ron Athey is an iconic figure in contemporary art and performance. In his frequently bloody portrayals of life, death, crisis, and fortitude in the time of AIDS, Athey provides insights and calls into question the limits of artistic practice and research. These limits enable Athey to explore key themes including gender, sexuality, radical sex, queer activism, post-punk and industrial culture, tattooing and body modification, ritual, philosophy, literature, creative-automatic writings, spirituality and religion. The first monograph on his work, "Pleading in the Blood", edited by Dominic Johnson, is published by LADA and Intellect Books in their Intellect Live series.
Art and the Philosophies of East & West
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Christopher Healey
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Art arises either in parallel with or in response to the implicit or explicit philosophies of a culture. Aesthetics and artistic processes have traditionally varied across cultures as a result. For example, the so-called "Western" Classical music tradition which has been influential and widespread throughout much of Europe is distinctly different from the artistic traditions that existed in Japan. Indeed, Japan presents an interesting example for comparison not only because its religo-philosophy is distinct from the Christianity, but because its location resulted in long periods of isolation from other cultures. It is only comparatively recently that the culture of Japan and that of Europe (as disparate as it may be) made meaningful contact.
This essay explores how Japanese art and European art were historically distinct, as well as examining the more recent examples of how this cross-cultural contact has influenced some notable composers.
First Draft (in Progress) Touching the surface: Concretising the image through an expansion of traditional aesthetics
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Rosa Marouane
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The field of aesthetics has relied on the visual as crutch for its speculation since the creation of its most fundamental texts. Whether it be through Immanuel Kant’s focus on human critique and its own influence on beauty, or Deleuze’s later texts covering the expanded Movement-image and Time-image, the experience of imagery has been reserved to those capable of sight, and more importantly, those able to testify of this act. Beginning with Jakob Von Uexküll’s ‘Umwelten’, the sensory experience of our environment becomes one formed through the combined input of multiple sensory organs and the processes used to interpret the stimuli these organs encounter. Though the focus of Von Uexküll’s Umwelten remains the visual aspect of this information package: the visual functions as dominant sense whilst the other senses are merely secondary in experiencing space; this interpretation of sensory imaging does begin to differ from what we consider to be traditional Aesthetics, in that it allows for the possibility of imagery existing in the worlds of organisms that either lack or possess higher optical processing capabilities than that of humans, thus opening the speculation on imagery to a wider field of organisms and their individual experience of the visual. Up to the 20th century however, imagery and the aesthetic studies surrounding it focus on an intangible entity, eithered layered on top of or derived from concrete form. The field of aesthetics is overdue a reconfiguration of its approach, and a new wave of aesthetics should be focussed on defying the restrictive visual realm. One proposal to an expansion of this area of research would be to incorporate an affective aspect into image production and dissemination, Affect in this case referring to Brian Massumi’s definition of the phenomenon wherein “to affect is to be affected” and the matter of affect is one of response that is neither physical nor emotional, but rather a mediation between aspects of the two, joining the virtual to the real in one fell swoop even if only temporarily. This applies to the image in the sense that it cannot be fully accessed, its surface tension never breached until either it becomes capable of affect, we become capable of affecting it, or in true Massumi-ian fashion, we develop a mutually affective relationship with imagery. Writers such as Hito Steyerl, who through her essay “In Defense of the Poor image” describes an affective relationship between the audience and image initiated by the propagation inherent to internet culture, and Tavi Meraud, who’s speculation on the surface as providing mediation between the intangible and tangible, introduces us to the touch allowing for a mediated form of seeing through an alternative sensory organ. Through these glimpses into an affective alternative to Aesthetics, we can begin to formulate further knowing that it can exist in a form that goes beyond the traditional non-affective, spectator-image binary; perhaps this can go even further to initiate a dissolution of the optical barrier to entry that imagery has until now maintained. Should the objective of Aesthetics be to further expand its own boundaries to account for an inclusion of sensory imaging into the aesthetic canon? Can imagery be perceived as a concrete, and consequently tactile phenomenon? Could this shifted interpretation of imagery bring us into contact with a concretised universally available image?