Date: Wed, 19 Feb 1997 17:36:33 -0800
From: Ariosto Raggo <df803-AT-freenet.carleton.ca>
Subject: Re: ...becoming...


George Free wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 19 Feb 1997, NECHVATAL Joseph wrote:
> 
> >
> > How does it for you? For me the definition of art which I am upholding
> > here, and which I find requires constant reiteration as artists move
> > increasingly from organic materials to the use of electronic & synthetic
> > ones, is that given by Susanne K. Langer in her book "Feeling And Form : A
> > theory of art developed from Philosophy in a New Key" where (on page 40)
> > she plainly states, "Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human
> > feeling."
> >
>         This is one philosophy of art. It also happens to be the one
> explicitly rejected in the 50s and 60s by the avant-garde, i.e., Cage
> /neo-dada/Fluxus/happenings/pop etc.
>         I think the problem with it mainly is that it reduces the art work
> to a representation of something else (feelings, emotions, etc.).  What
> the new art was interested in was being the thing itself, with no
> reference to anything other than what it was. The point of such an attempt
> to be non-expressive or non-referential is, as I understand it, to induce
> direct awareness of the current moment in which the work is apprehended,
> that is, now. Such awareness brings us in contact with reality, with our
> emotions among other things.
> 
>         George
> 
>

Lyotard in "The sublime and the Avant-Garde" with regards to the *now*
writes that it is "what dismantles consciousness, what deposes
consciousness, it is what consciousness cannot formulate, and even what
consciousness forgets in order to constitute itself." 'It' is that which
elludes consciousness in so far as consc. is trying to bring a
synthesizing imposition on matter(in the sense of multiplicity of
sensations) and thereby construct a concept or representation rather
than allowing that which is perceived to appear for itself. this letting
go of our synthesizing will is just what makes room for an "apparition"
and not some kind of conceptual art form reducing the play of constant
becoming. In terms of Kant what is being questioned or suspended is
determinant judgement. Also, the issue of this approach to the
Avant-Garde is that it is not necessarily and solely something to do
with specific artist near to our own time(Cage, Newman, Gorecki, etc)
but can involve as a trace medieval precursors such as the School of St.
Victor as Lyotard points out in this essay. 
what one is *doing* when the will to representations is suspended is
that one is there... with that which is *happening* that lyotard again
calls an "occurrence" and further suggests that it could be related to
the Heideggerian notion of an "event", of ein ereignis which "is
infinitely simple, but this simplicity can only be approached through a
state of privation. That which we call thought must be disarmed." Also,
it makes no sense to delink oneself from this event even in the
performance of writing that currently occurs as the traversal of the
emptyness of the screen. In other 'words' what is occuring here... is an
evacuation of the depth of language such that a superficial drift
crosses the screen without meaning or symbolism, interrupting all
hermenuticist appropriations -- this is just the "plasticity of a line"


moi aussi, je suis un peintre !

Appolonaire

Ariosto Raggo



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