Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 20:49:50 EDT
Subject: yo yo
To: carlo-AT-echonyc.com


Carlo -- Can you forward this to those who might be interested?


MONDAY, OCTOBER 11, 5:30 P.M. (first meeting)

at The Brecht Forum, 122 West 27th Street, 10th floor, NY, NY 10001
information: (212) 242-4201 or Comerandy-AT-aol.com

RE-IMAGINING THE AESTHETIC
a six session discussion/reading group
Andrew Comer, facilitator

Art, in accordance with the absurd ideologies that saturate our ways of 
seeing the bureaucratic capitalist world, is often taught, made, exhibited, 
and discussed as if it were an isolated realm of timeless "genius" wholly 
unrelated to, and even spiteful of, our everyday lives.  At the same time, 
our "alternative" (i.e., academic) modes of explanation themselves often lack 
lucidity, exuberance, and vitality:  some "Marxist" criticism has become 
infamous for crudely reducing forms of aesthetic and cultural expression to 
dispensable and frivolous "reflections" of class power, while what many know 
as "cultural studies" often construes the aesthetic encounter as 
indeterminate and, ultimately, inaccesible.  In effect, what we experience as 
art is often already severed from everyday life by the philosophical language 
in which it is embedded and "explained."  Our reading/discussion group will 
think about ways to excavate radicalized aesthetic experience -- that is, 
existence at once radically politicized and committed to addressing 
fundamental life-questions often ignored by "political" discourse, in 
particular those framing the experiences of desire, neurosis, laughter, 
depression, beauty, pleasure, loneliness, paranoia, sensuality, hypochondria, 
collectivity, and the "irrational"/unknown.  Although discussion-based, 
readings may be drawn from the work of Artaud, Marx, Benjamin, Deleuze, 
Guattari, Nietzsche, Lautreamont, Irigaray, Williams, Nin, Miller, Burroughs, 
and Blanchot.



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