Suchergebnisse

This lecture finds its starting point in an observation regarding collections of things that appear to have gathered as if of their own volition. In domestic spaces, unconscious movements and levels of indecision give rise to these various accumulations, which can remain unseen even while in view. The phenomenon lends itself to study under the heading of 'the everyday', revealing complexities of psychic life in inhabited space. But it is an event of other kinds of space and space-use too, not least workspace where unconsciously accumulated archives can have a strategic function, even while the apparent 'act' of collecting escapes the practitioner's control. Here, the name 'insensate archiving' is proposed to help explore how the material practice in question provides a perspective on work. Specifically, the insensate archive offers clues to how criticality emerges in artists' work where it may not have been expected, and where more conventional ways of thinking about criticality would not be well-suited to grasp the stakes in what's taking place. Support for the idea of insensate archiving is found in the work of curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who testifies to a closely related event in her own practice. Just as her 'compost archive' names an aspiration for exhibition organisation, so the insensate archive makes possible a political engagement with current discourse on material practice and the institutions in which such practices take place. The idea of criticality in material practice is expanded through a reading of remarks by historian Georges Didi-Huberman, for whom a viewer's encounter with the image can be a form of criticality in its own right, even before the discourses usually thought necessary to make criticality evident. In his account, the viewer's pause during which such work takes place amounts to an unexpected agency given over to the components of the image, with revelations to follow. The insensate archive, it is argued, works in a comparable way with components that have assume their own power to come and go in material terms, thus confounding customary ideas of the archive and revealing a form of criticality peculiar to material practice.

Discussions on writing in the context of art practice are often framed and explored as matters of boundaries. While the territorial claims of one discipline over another may be important issues—not least for artists contextualising their work in relation to literature—this approach can prove blind to certain 'events of the boundary' by which diverse practitioners lose their identity in collective work. This paper proposes that shared politics are emerging across disciplines of art and literature. The contemporary phenomenon of artists who take up writing practices cannot be understood sufficiently as a new or renewed form of art practice. Instead, it must be thought a kind of resistance, one that is immanent to art practice but that does not progress the concerns of the discipline in any of the ways expected. Artists' writing practice need not be thought as the capturing of territory nor as art by other means; it can be understood as a way of working with unexpected partners to chart an extra-disciplinary realm, discovering both new potentials in the present and future practices.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction: Deleuze and Guattari and Contemporary Art -- POLITICS -- Chapter 1 The Politics of the Scream in a Threnody -- Chapter 2 A Shift Towards the Unnameable -- Chapter 3 The Heterogenesis of Fleeing -- Chapter 4 Anita Fricek: Contemporary Painting as Institutional Critique -- THE AESTHETIC PARADIGM -- Chapter 5 Capitalism and Schizophrenia and Consensus: Of Relational Aesthetics -- Chapter 6 The Practice and Anti- Dialectical Thought of an 'Anartist' -- Chapter 7 Ethologies of Software Art: What Can a Digital Body of Code Do? -- Chapter 8 Fractal Philosophy (And the Small Matter of Learning How to Listen): Attunement as the Task of Art -- SCENES AND ENCOUNTERS -- Chapter 9 An Art Scene as Big as the Ritz: The Logic of Scenes -- Chapter 10 Abstract Humour, Humorous Abstraction -- Chapter 11 From Aesthetics to the Abstract Machine: Deleuze, Guattari and Contemporary Art Practice -- Chapter 12 Traps Against Capture -- TECHNOLOGIES -- Chapter 13 Sign and Information: On Anestis Logothetis' Graphical Notations -- Chapter 14 Anti- Electra: Totemism and Schizogamy -- Chapter 15 Unimaginable Happenings: Material Movements in the Plane of Composition -- Chapter 16 BLOODCRYSTALPOLLENSTAR -- Notes on Contributors -- Index