Sunday 20 September 2015

Midpointness Day 6 Appendix from Leanne

Day 6 Appendix




Midpointness



Many thanks to Leanne Schubert for this.





LINKS










Midpointness Day 6


Day 6





The exercise yard in the Lock-Up, serving as a reading room
and a symposium space from for the period of Midpointness.

Midpointness

2 x 0 ÷ 1 = 0


Many thanks to the contributers of the reading groups over the past couple of days. Far too much to get down onto paper/screen here. My respect and gratitude to Jude, Penny, (who's equation above refers to my habit of creating nothing from something),  Rosemary, Leanne (A.K.A. 'Spanner' ), Fern, Christina, Alex, Sean, Penny,  Emily, Sarah, Liz, and  Jess. Interesting gender imbalance.  

We are indebted to the authors of the texts.  

We have all  been round the houses and back but the whole thing might be summed up in the spirit of a comment from Leanne, following on from discussions about Blanchot, Social Work, the work of the Work of art and the 'lack' which haunts the image. Leanne's parting words at the end of the third session were,
"The Work of Art is the renunciation of Desire"

These were the texts we were working through.

Text. Jan Verwoert. “Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to defy the pressure to perform” in Tell me what you want, what you really, really want. (Rotterdam: Pier Zwart Institute, William de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University and Sternberg Press, 2010), 13 - 41

Text. Andrew Warstat. “Unteachable and Unlearnable: the ignorance of artists” in: On not knowing; how artists think ed. Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum. (London. Black Dog in association with Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge and supported by the University of the Arts London, 2013), 42-52

Text. W.J. Mitchell “What do pictures want” in What do pictures want: the lives and loves of images (Chicago. The University of Chicago Press, 2005) p 28-56

Text. Elizabeth Grosz “Chaos. Cosmos, Territory, Architecture ” in Chaos, Territory, Art ( New York, Columbia University Press, 2008 ) 1-24

It would be impossible to fully recount the range of discussion here but I have no doubt that things will surface through the coming week and hopefully merge somehow into this blog and into the project as a whole as I hope things will for all the contributors in their own endeavours, all of which seem wonderful.. 

These texts are providing something of a back bone to the project, thinking through  (and beyond) performance culture, not knowing, the Blanchotian student, the weak image (causing  a particular stir in the group), framing chaos, zones of transaction between image and text, three forms of enlightenment, (the historical enlightenment, the enlightened sophisticated reader, and the spiritual), ventriloquism, (twice cropped up), taboo, the subaltern, how inverting pictures is bad for the soul, radical unsatisfaction, the impotent, the anamorphic blur and art as an instrument of the mind (thanks to Christina for that one).

back on Monday