Unlike
anything human, art lays claim to being unable to lie,
and thus it is compelled to lie.-Theodor Adorno
You put your left hand in,
you put your left hand out,
You put your right hand in,
and you shake it all about,
You do the hokey pokey
and you turn yourself around,
That's what its all about.
From a popular American game of gesture
This. Is Not a Poem.
Perhaps it is unfortunate that within the mystical allegory
of poetic space, we, as humans,
cannot be replaced by abstractions for which we stand.
Faulted by physicality, we are
driven to assume a presence not merely out of a desire to
chart the coordinates of place
but to follow our pure intuition
to formulate the amorphous
around us — as a lived
and vectored category consumed
by gestures rendered
at times with decisive caution and, at others, with murderous
instinct. This habitual
inclination to announce ourselves
as present, as here and
now in the whatever, leads us
to draft the blueprint for the
hierarchy of organized social
structures, super systems, and
all the possible political,
social, human, and theological
tyrannies of history.
~
In our two hands we find the
appendages that seek out to
depart from personal inwardness to intervene into a field
that is no longer our own.
We do so in order to begin to
build concepts and epresentations
and to seek out
abstract and sensuous content.
In this exploration of self in relation to place, our
shortsightedness is in the
assumption that we are symmetrical
two sided beings.
Subsequently, we gesture into
the world in an incongruent
way failing to understand the
difference between the left
and the right, imbalanced
and swayed by our inherent
bilaterality that places us as
much in the world among
things as within ourselves.
~
As a pivot extended spatially
into many dimensions, our body launches into a performative
and kinesthetic livedout
space further innervated
by human intuition to take
detours and deviations from
the habitual. In this framework,
the process of thought
rests not on the understanding
of time as a linear continuum
but as a move that is
altogether lifted out of a
chronology of the narrative
into the ambiguity of poetics.
Beyond Cartesian subjects,
we are molded in relation to
experiences informed by
alienation and the fear of
possible annihilation that
extend our logic from merely
the definitive. Isn’t this why
we have stopped to demand
that our belief be supported by proof?
~
We are delineated by truth
and by opinion. In rationalizing
the authority over what we perceive as the
truth, we adopt delusional
strategies in the form of
instructions, faulted codes
and rituals, legislation and
dictates to produce spin-offs of the real . There is
nothing
in art that does not derive
from the world. And yet if
art feels a compulsion to lie,
it may do so boldly without
the need to find an excuse.
In the complexities of its
staged matrix, art may gradually
unravel the irony of tactics
and strategies to those of
us who are in an intoxicated
state of deflection.
~
Contrary to the human subject, art is not bound to the paranoia
of finitude or selfconsciousness although art
does behave like a human
subject. Partly the organization
of materials and partly
technology, art additionally
holds ambiguous matter that
allows it to claim a special
authority as art. In its gesture
toward freedom, it may share
what is common to most
functionally driven objects.
However, this gesture in art
projects a future as an overcoming
of the antinomies of
the present to locate the site
where the place and nature of
change may be staged.
~
The sustainability of a work
of art relates also to a conception
of historical time that
provides for an understanding
between a work’s internal
organization and its external
projection. This gap between
the world and the work is
what returns the work to
reckon with the past, so that
the present be freed from the
hold of the past to the extent
that the past does not determine
the present’s self-conception.
This striving for, this
potential, is what enables art
to transcend beyond the here
and now and to seek out
what Adorno refers to as "the something more" or
the "crackling noise" that extends
beyond the work's rational
construction as art's apparition.
Its apparition doesn't
entail something phantasmagorical
as if to illicit the
image of ghostly "something mores" wandering
into infinitude
throughout Valery's
museum and mausoleum. Art's cunning is the sense of
irony with which it sabotages
anything illusory.
~
In its animate behavior,
Adorno has claimed that art
is a “picture puzzle, in that
what it hides, as in the work
of Edgar Allen Poe, is visible,
and by being visible, it is at
once hidden.” As a riddle,
finding the solution is not
necessarily the point of
course as none exits. Instead,
we are led to pose additional
questions that return us to
the work time and again.
The ability for a work of art
to display the infinite in the
finite is the way art displays
the key to its survival and its
performability. As human
subjectivity becomes invested
in the work as an object, it
endows the meaning of the
object, redirecting human
subjectivity into a non-futile
form. This explains the
simple trick as to how
aesthetic intuition is intellectual
intuition made objective. Oksana Pasaiko -
Ruthenia
November 3. 2004
(translated by Marta Kuzma)
Marta Kuzma was most recently
Co-curator of Manifesta 5, 2004 (San Sebastian, Spain)
apexart's exhibitions and programs are supported in
part by The Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual
Arts, the Kettering Family
Foundation, the Peter Norton
Family Foundation, Altria
Group, Inc., and with public
funds from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the
New York City Department
for Cultural Affairs, and the
New York State Council on
the Arts, a State agency. This
exhibition received support
from the Experimental
Television Center and the Consulate General of the
Federal Republic of Germany
in New York.
This brochure was supported
in part by The Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation
and was designed by ROMA.
Heidi image courtesy
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
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