'Ists' & 'Isms'

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Following JK's lecture and MA discussion on Thursday, I've been processing some more about movements and their nature/purpose.

I fear this is ground that has already been well trodden and the paths already smooth, compacted and familiar. However I guess its good to explore for yourself and see where it can lead.

The question was regarding what era are we in now, after post modernism, or meta modernism or alter modernism. (I remember we discussed some other postulations). In addition we discussed what movements might there be in light of the digital technology that is now available to the arts?

However for all the possible angles I end up thinking of the quote "The clay does not say to the potter, what are you making?". Similarly I wonder if artists in the era of cubism, impressionism were too conscious of what movement they belonged if any, (although after modernism I sense a change in the self awareness/self consciousness of the artist and the art they made) 

It feels as though it is after the event, that a burgeoning movement becomes acknowledged and receives it's nomenclature from the exterior/more dominant culture. Even then I want to resist the 'taxonomy', it feels restrictive with a subtext of violence. The aggressive 'spatlung' splitting, a removal from the body. 

"splitting to use the term chosen by Lacan, therefore masks the subject from himself in the utterances he makes on himself and on the world. But Lacan also tells us that in discourse the subject experiences his lack of being, as he is no more than represented in discourse, just a s his desire is no more than represented there." Lemaire Anik - Jacques Lacan 1970 p73

Derrida also speaks of the violence of ecrire, that act of making an impression upon the page to write, to name to other.

It seems a naive and plaintiff cry, but is enough just to make, to research and to have value in what I do - I am highly cautious of being seduced by the zeitgeist - who all too often turns out to be shallow, usury and fleeting.

Then it all comes back to Kant's dove it's dream of being liberated from air resistance.

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Chen Zhen

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There is something deeply satisfying about the physicality of Chen Zhen’s sculpture and choice of materials. It seems he often chooses to leave the material unaltered but manipulated out of it’s normal context. A particular and specific use of visual language. The black rubber inner tube becomes an almost natural element, like grass or reeds, yet they are unapologetically honest in their use with no attempt to cover up or hide the history of the objects or material.

In fact the presence of the history of the object is imperative, intrinsic to the reading of the work. The language of history and past experiences is. curious one because that too is read and created especially by the viewer and their lived experience. The associations and emotions attached to an old chair or a drum can be multifarious.Yet there is still a specific tone of voice to the work. Awkward and suggestive, nostalgic and melancholic.

I like the work but I wouldn’t want to make it.

“One should learn to break out of one’s own cocoon and be courageous enough to break away from one’s self and to abandon one’s own cultural context. The Chinese proverb ‘the soul has left its shelter’ in fact symbolizes the critical state in which one’s creative capacity has reached the most active zenith.” Chen Zhen
(Quoted in Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea 2003, p.83.)

Connected to this notion of moving beyond one’s immediate cultural environment is Chen’s term ‘Transexperience’, which he coined in 1998 while living between New York, Paris and Shanghai in order to describe what curator Hou Hanru has defined as ‘the dynamic and dialectical process that occurs when an individual is displaced between cultures, societies and languages’ (Hanru, ‘“Transexperience” in the art of Chen Zhen’, in Serpentine Gallery 2001, p.15.) According to Hanru, ‘Transexperience suggested to [Chen] both the fusion with these other influences and, simultaneously, the ability to transcend their impact’ (Hanru 2001, p.15). As a result of his combining creative techniques and influences from the divergent countries and cultures in which he resided in works such as Cocon du Vide, Chen has been described by art historians as a ‘transcultural artist’, as was explored in the exhibition Chen Zhen’s Transcultural Art in Paris Retrospective at Galerie Perrotin, Paris, in 2014. Tate website:
 https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/chen-cocon-du-vide-t12941

///Temporary Homes For The Liminal\\\

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Derrida

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"Great works [philosophy/literature/writing] transform the context of their reception and this takes time". Royle Nicholas - Jacques Derrida Routledge P73

What if writing or a work of art could physically change the space/ landscape around us because of the power of the text/ message/ essence of the meaning. Quantum physics - transforming the environment similar to the word? Observed particles behave differently///

Pharmakon poison and remedy, both or sacrifice (Human)//////

"Adrian Mróz, a Polish-American philosopher and musician, analyses its application to art and argues that pharmakon is any physical, mental, or behavioral object[7] which can cut (techne). In other words, pharmaka are agential and responsible for changes in consciousness." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmakon_(philosophy)

More reading in Pharmakon?///

Deconstruction

"Derrida has spoken of what impels his writing as a trembling, a 'shaking' or a 'soliciting'. He has written again and again, but always differently, about 'producing a force of dislocation that spreads itself throughout the entire system', about deconstruction as 'de-sedimantation', about a force of irruption that '[disorganises] the entire inherited order'" Royle Nicholas - Jacques Derrida, Routledge P25

"Even the most apparently simple statement is subject to fission or fissure. This is deconstruction as destabilisation always already on the move within. 'There is no atom', as Derrida remarks what is one of his most succinct and most quietly, subterraneously explosive formulations. Everything is divisible. Unity, coherence, univocality are effects produced out of division and divisibility. This is what gives rise to the elaboration of terms such as differance, iterability, the trace, the supplement"  Royle Nicholas - Jacques Derrida, Routledge P26

"It is about shaking up, dislocating, and transforming the verbal, conceptual, psychological, textual, aesthetic, historical, ethical, social, political, and religious landscape. It's concern is to disturb, to de-sediment, to deconstruct". Royle Nicholas - Jacques Derrida, Routledge P26

• Print Derrida - A letter to a friend - read and pull threads about Phramakon, deconstruction, atoms, everything is divisible, constituent parts, diagrams. Liminal?

• Read Liminal - Greg V 

• Find Artists to research

• Find Book from Christian Perspective? Scripture?

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