Vanishing Points

Natasha Chuk

Description

Deftly deploying Derrida’s notion of the “unexperienced experience” and building on Paul Virilio’s ideas about the aesthetics of disappearance, Vanishing Points explores the aesthetic character of presence and absence as articulated in contemporary art, photography, film, and emerging media. Addressing works ranging from Robert Rauschenberg to Six Feet Under, Natasha Chuk emphasizes the notion that art is an accident, an event, which registers numerous overlapping, contradictory orientations, or vanishing points, between its own components and the viewers’ perspective—generating the power to create unexperienced experiences. It will be a must read for anyone interested in contemporary art and its intersection with philosophy.

Foreword by Victor Vitanza

Introduction

Chapter 1: Ruptures: Negation in the Created Object

Chapter 2: Art and Unexperienced Experience

Chapter 3: Memorialization and Objects of the Dead

Chapter 4: The Apparatus and the Unfixed Vanishing Point

Chapter 5: Presence, Absence, and Play in the Hyperreal Spaces of Computation

Chapter 6: Traces of Absence in Photography: Dina Kantor and Alec Soth

Chapter 7: The Cost of Burying the Dead: Six Feet Under

Epilogue: Resisting Arrest: The Elusive Vanishing Point

Sujets

• Energie & environnement
• Film
• Six Feet Under
• Derrida
• Paul Virilio
• General
• Engineering
• Technology
• General officer
• Philosophy of mind
• Sciences et techniques
• Power Resources

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783204779
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2015 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2015 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Production manager: Claire Organ
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-476-2
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-478-6
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-477-9
Printed and bound by Gwasg Gomer Cyf / Gomer Press Ltd, UK
Contents
Foreword by Victor Vitanza
Introduction
Chapter 1: Ruptures: Negation in the Created Object
Chapter 2: Art and Unexperienced Experience
Chapter 3: Memorialization and Objects of the Dead
Chapter 4: The Apparatus and the Unfixed Vanishing Point
Chapter 5: Presence, Absence, and Play in the Hyperreal Spaces of Computation
Chapter 6: Traces of Absence in Photography: Dina Kantor and Alec Soth
Chapter 7: The Cost of Burying the Dead: Six Feet Under
Epilogue: Resisting Arrest: The Elusive Vanishing Point
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
Victor Vitanza
What is hidden in laughter must remain so.
—Georges Bataille
In the bugginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance . Instead of the sentence, the sounddance .
—Norman O. Brown
The foreword is written by someone other than the author of the book, usually by an authority in the field who brings credibility to the book and the author while celebrating the written work.
—Anonymous
Time, readers, please?
Let us re-begin with notes. A Performance of—a romance with, virtually an affair with—comically-farcically as it may become—the book: Vanishing Points .
About Nothingness.
The Foreword keeps trying to climb on top of the book, ‘becoming sexual.’ Erratically so. To make new books.
Writing a Foreword that is an assignment until it becomes an assignation …
The immediate question, henceforth, is Who wrote this book? Who is the author, or rather auteur ? As in cinema. The object of our desires? This ‘I’ has searched and searched and has found a few clues. Left by someone for someone, but for whom?
Some snippets of clues: Let ‘us’ read together the opening:
Opening notice: ‘I think a lot about invisibility.’ Then, ‘Reality is increasingly digitally rendered and privacy is becoming more and more difficult to define. I tend to think of it as a privilege, not a given. Privacy engages the ability to opt into hiding and opt out of being available to the public’s senses. As a social subject in a synthetically rendered reality, my participation in the public realm is a default: I am involuntarily open to the signals that require my attention.’
Well, ‘I’ started with a surveillance, searching for pictures, images, on Google. With not much luck. And yet, there were possibilities that presented themselves. For instance, ‘I’ found Gmail for a possible writer of this book. What presented itself is the following message, which I read supposedly addressed to ‘me.’ It had been there in virtual space for about a year or so. It reads: ‘My Gmail status is set to “invisible”’ and appropriately affirms my choice by informing me “You are invisible.” These are small but significant assurances which make my being tethered to my connectable devices bearable.’ But then again, from Google Contacts, this ‘I’ was told: ‘Visible only to you.’ How charming and unarming! But now what?
This person, ‘I’ discovered further, has on Google six people in circles. I thought, this person must be a connoisseur of people. But the names were in Russian! Exhausting a Google search, ‘I’ searched on LinkedIn, and found ‘someone,’ but the picture was of a television test pattern. On Twitter, I found a female, perhaps, but with wide sunglasses covering most of ‘her’ face. Sunglasses that were comparable to the size that Jacqueline Kennedy was known to wear! After searching through Facebook, however, I found someone. Her .
In rather different ways, this experience remains comparable to searching for Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, Bobby Fischer, etc. Fort/Da. Fort/Da. Fort/Da.
•
Last of all : On the impossibility of writing a foreword for Vanishing Points , and yet the necessity of bringing one forth in words by tripping, stumbling over other words. This ‘I’ has not forgotten that The Author is Dead . So really, Why does this ‘I’ search for the dead? But this is a serious matter that takes on a more, non-productive playfulness. In terms of these contraries: Invisible-Visible. Absence-Presence. Death-Life. And yet, more impotently, all that finds itself in the middle. Muddle. As an exclamation, not a question point. Affirmation-!-Negation. And yet, again, rather in a third place. One that is the great exclusion. Yes, the excluded third. As the imagined auteur says: through art and then philosophy or vice & versa . A question arises, however, about the remains, remnants, between, the openness of V&V? And! Some more? Well, it has been determined to be non-positive affirmations .
Jacques Lacan supposedly often asked his patients how far they could count.
Is this all about measurement! Accountability! For example, The Vitruvian Man ? The measurer of all things! Canonized! Human beings as Man likened to Euclidean Geometry vice versa. With ideal proportions. And yet, ever again, after Euclidean? There comes? Elliptic, Hyperbolic, etc., geometries. An embarrassment of Grotesqueries.
A flashback: Remember having your hand slapped and told, ‘Don’t touch that!’ Yet ‘we’ could not not touch ‘it.’ To this day. We desire to touch whatever. Think: The objects of our desires. But really, how does the object touch us, we, who art scattered! If not reassigned. So then, we eventually in time awaken and have a fad discussion of Object-oriented ontologies. And ‘we’ see how the object objects to our subjectivity . Reciprocity of sorts? Then, ‘we,’ some of us, recall the other third of Abject. Abjection. Subject-Object-Abject.
Losing our Renaissance vanishing points, our modernity perspectives, all is up for grabs. Floating here and there and over there in the vacuum. As the auteur says: All is to be confronted in the objects that we create. Perhaps it has come, in time, to the revenge of the crystal . Against carbon. Or simply put: the object! Think of a closing time : Think of Mad-cow dis-ease.
Moreover, there is our loss of conceptual starting places ( topoi ), or our points of stasis to the ex-stasis , being thrown out, yet along side others. Adjacent. Not agents, but adjacencies. Being-there. Say, Design as Dasein .
We have lost our sense of time, temporality. Or perhaps it might be better put as ‘we’— who are no longer WE —are experiencing an acceleration of time, in late- or post-modernity. As much as we have remained framed every workday in terms of Tic-Toc, we are being thrown in between the other, middle side of
Toc [ ] Tic
Waiting for the return of Tic. Let us embrace of tics. Yes, accelerated, but eventually lost. For and in moments, unmeasureable moments. What intrudes perhaps is exemplified in what Freud has called Nachträglichkeit . Too early [ Ereignis /Event] Too late. ‘We’ miss a train of thoughts.
Are ‘you’ AM or PM. Do not get confused with the question in terms of AC and DC!
•
There is so much more that desires to be said. For the moment: Once ever again: Who wrote this book? Which is a question that has eventually here taken this ‘I’ back to Georges Bataille. Rereading, reglancing, searching for my notes in his books. Our books. Nobody’s book. Books … Ah, here are the notes. Bataille thinks it the best of impossible worlds to never, ever be recognized . He writes in Inner Experience :
If one proceeds right to the end, one must efface oneself, under go solitude, suffer from it, renounce being recognized : to be as though absent, insane over this, to undergo things without will and without hope, to be elsewhere. One must bury thought alive (due to what exists in its depths). I publish it knowing it in advance to be misread, having to be so.
(155; Bataille’s emphasis)
Some more background with an anecdote: Bataille was in the Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel seminar that Alexandre Kojève offered at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes , in Paris between 1933 and 1939. The seminar deals in part with master-slave struggles for recognition and deals with self-consciousness and in particular the unhappy consciousness. By chance, while reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit , Bataille sees an intruder. He says:
As I write, a ladybug flies under my lamp and alights on my hand; I lift her off and put her on a sheet of paper. A while ago I copied out one of Hegel’s schemas on the paper, a diagram showing the various forms he has for getting from one extremity to the other, from [universality to individuality]. She stopped in the Geist column, where you go from [universal mind to sensory consciousness (individuality)], by way of [people, state, and world history]. Moving along on her perplexed way she drops into a column marked [Life] her home territory before getting to the center column’s ‘unhappy consciousness,’ which is only nominally relevant to her.
I’m humiliated by this pretty little bug. I lack any happy consciousness in her presence.
( Guilty, 44 )
For Bataille, it is better to have not been recognized at birth, during his life, and after his life. It would be total invisibility. But surely, he is caught in between invisibility/visibility.
•
Foreword? As an Afterword? Or as Foreskin: Much less a ‘Circumfession’! As Jacques Derrida writes. Still, what will have been read, say, in a Future Anterior. The impos