Bhabha

What do I really think about Anish Kapoor? /  by Justin Harrison

I’m torn, I’m not sure I like Anish Kapoor’s work anymore, which is kinda tricky as I was looking at him for my research paper. I’m sure he doesn’t mind, but there you have it, after looking for a while I’ve become less enthusiastic about it.

I do like the language of the materials. The imperfect dialogue, I can’t translate it all, but who can? The text of steel or the dialect of paint. It murmers in deep tones, a quiet melodic muttering.

Yet I feel disatisfied, like I’ve eaten but still feel hungry. I want to access more but feel arrested at times. I know how much Homi Bhabha enjoys his work, which makes me stop, pulls me up. But when I hear him talk it seems like a lot of the creativity and intellectual rigour is Bhabha’s rather than what Kapoor has invested in the work.

Some of his recent paintings feel tedious and a little in the territory of art therapy. I find I don’t want to interpret them, I feel repelled rather than a desire to enquire. Content and context matter. Materials matter. The above work I do like however I’m finding that there is more that I don’t.

The work of translation and interpretation is often the burden of the audience, yet how much? This is another rabbit hole of Roland Barthes and others.

 

ZARINA HASHMI /  by Justin Harrison

ZARINA HASHMI - I notice her work has similar motifs to the ‘Bundle’ drawings, in addition her work focuses a lot on displacement. I discovered her trying to wade through a lecture I found by Homi Bhabha. He’s messing with me in a wonderful way. He hits all the notes that connect. I think I’m actually starting to really enjoy researching. Language, displacement, translation, liminal. And I didn’t realise that he was so closely connected to the arts.

I need to investigate her work more.

57:30 These material practices that I have termed the poses of facture are more than mere surfaces of inscription or materials submitted to transformation. They're as active in their signification of cultural translation as any other discursive or semiotic system.

And I have often thought that we have been so trapped in the idea of face-to-faceness or in the idea of binaries or polarities, things that I have resisted thinking about, forms a foreignness or otherness or alterity that there are other ways in which the making of work is also the translation too, the making of work is the encounter with alterity and I find that very much in her(Zarina Hashmi) case.

Bhabha Homi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVQcdbSV6OI

 

The liminal and void are the same, not the same /  by Justin Harrison

The liminal and the void are the same, not the same. They share qualities essences sensibilities and lacking. Yet the void by its nature must be empty. The liminal is thick and soupy,. In both locations references become null, maps Undraw themselves and time frays.

In both codes and coordinates unravel, like nets cast upon the world to create order. To locate the self.

But to exit the void leaves what?

To exit the liminal leaves the old behind and ushers forth the new, change, transformation.

There are a number of references which need to be kept apart and should not be used interchangeably. The liminal, the void, the in-between. The non place. The Third Space. The middle.

Specifically the liminal has a vectorality of the passage.

The liminal is full.

The void empty

Maybe in Kapoors work the void correctly identifies what is generated by imperialism, a consuming absence. Where as UvR’s work identifies the marginal liminal experience - not so removed. Not empty but ambiguous.

With my artwork things are the same not the same. I use an objects history to locate a vector, but replace it in time establishing another vector. In the materiality I am using its history. It’s Hauntology. With the fence panels I have in my work I am engaging in the history of a friend who’s now passed.  It’s  purpose haunts. A fence a boundary a margin. The materials history , purpose and materiality become part of the minor literature.

Same, not the same /  by Justin Harrison

In the introduction to Foucault’s book ‘The order of Things’ the author references an old encyclopedia with various classifications, in which is a category of ‘Things that from far away look like flies’.

Whilst it is tempting to make comparisons, we must remember our positionality, not just spatially but temporally, conceptually, socially and critically.

Homi Bhabha describes that there are differing scalar effects of different angles of view through the intersticies. And perhaps I wonder - that one can be so far off that perception is skewed and really comparisons cannot be made.

Perhaps imagine a toy cow 🐄, go to a field of cows hold it up and they might even look the same, in colour, form and scale. However one is not a cow, you won’t get milk out of it. They are the same but not the same.

 

Rabbit Holes /  by Justin Harrison

In thinking and researching about ‘Belonging’, ‘Boundaries’, ‘Transformation’ ‘Formation’

I have been looking at Derrida a lot, his exploration of ‘Differance’ ‘Trace’ Deconstruction’, ‘Spectres’ and ‘Hauntology’. I have now discovered Homi Bhabha. I see similarities of thought and approach, descriptions and models. I don’t know either work well enough to specifically state what exact differences or similarities they share. However I do feel the readings I have already made around Derrida - help me to being to approach Bhaba’s work.

I am also aware that Bhaba criticises Derrida’s work in falling short and failing to address Ethnocentricity and yet…

I do find the exploration of Space more specifically the third space and linguistics very interesting and return to my own enquiries to the language of art, navigation of change and the liminal.

Translation, Afterlife, Ghosts.

It’s a Rabbit hole I fear to go down, the depth of both authors work feels beyond me.

Translating transformation by documenting change. Looking back at the afterlife.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVQcdbSV6OI