Bare-Life-Empyre-documenta

A publication of –empyre- soft-skinned space Sydney, Australia, July 2006

A collaboration with documenta 12 magazine project

And moderator Christina McPhee

On the topic

“what is bare life?”

Go to the Art and the document site for details on a research cluster I am involved with at SCA, USYD.

“Art and the Document is a Sydney College of the Arts research cluster actively exploring the dynamic relationship between documentary and aesthetic practices across the spectrum of contemporary art forms. The research also aims to serve as a catalyst in the production of knowledge that emerges from new kinds of dialogue between art and documentary practices.”

The exhibition The Image in Question was developed by this cluster in August 2014.

brainrian-catalogue-online online version

Reposted from : Posthegemony

There is nothing necessarily spontaneous or unconscious about the disruption of habit, and dehabituation can be taken on as a conscious strategy. Indeed, it is the avant garde gesture par excellence. During the Pinochet dictatorship, the Colectivo Acciones de Arte (Art Action Collective or CADA), comprising several prominent Chilean artists and writers such as novelist Diamela Eltit, poet Raúl Zurita, and visual artist Lotty Rosenfeld, staged a series of performances designed to intervene in and interrupt the establishment of everyday habits of neoliberal consumerism.

As Robert Neustadt’s CADA DÍA (literally, “Every Day”) documents, these actions included the October 1979 “Inversion of Scene” that aimed to “underline the transparency of everyday repression” by cloaking Santiago’s Museum of Fine Arts with a white sheet on the one hand and renting ten milk trucks on the other while taking out an advert in a daily newspaper that consisted in nothing more than a blank page (31). CADA’s purpose was literally to screen off the museum while touching upon familiar objects and practices (the newspaper, drinking milk) so as, in Nelly Richard’s words, “to modify both the customary perceptions of the city [. . .] and the social norms which regulate the behaviour of the citizen” (Margins and Institutions 55). Other CADA actions included showering the city with 400,000 fliers dropped from the air, in the name of “a fusion of ‘art’ with ‘life’” (Neustadt 35), and Lotty Rosenfeld’s conversion of the broken white line in the middle of streets and highways into a series of crosses. These are classic shock tactics of artistic defamiliarization, undertaken on a massive scale. Especially in their willful disarticulation of the signs of normality that the dictatorship wanted to convey for both national and external consumption they set out to force “the gaze to unlearn what the press habitually teaches it” (Margins and Institutions 56).

At the same time, and beyond the fact that the artistic avant-garde is all too easily recuperated into a familiar tradition of provocation that can never quite escape the aestheticizing gaze, surely any artistic shock tactic could be no more than pale reflection of the effects of the coup itself. If art is defamiliarization, then like it or not Pinochet was its greatest Chilean practitioner.

Hyponoetics – Metaphysical Definitions and Principles. (go here)

One of the most important new concepts introduced in contemporary theory is Georgio Agamben’s notion of bare life. (see article here)

To develop the paradoxes of bare life, let us begin with Agamben’s definition of this concept. Reworking Aristotle’s [2] and Hannah Arendt’s [3] distinctions between biological existence (zoe)and the political life of speech and action (bios), between mere life and a good life, Agamben introduces in Homo Sacer his own interpretation and his own necessarily selective genealogy of “bare life” from antiquity to modernity. Stripped from political significance and exposed to murderous violence, bare life is both the counterpart of the sovereign decision on the state of exception and the target of sovereign violence. To avoid misunderstanding, I would like to stress the point that is made sometimes only implicitly in Agamben’s work and not always sufficiently stressed by his commentators: namely, the fact that bare life, wounded, expendable, and endangered, is not the same as biological zoe, but rather the remainder of the destroyed political bios. As Agamben puts it in his critique of Hobbes’ state of nature, mere life “is not simply natural reproductive life, the zoe of the Greeks, nor bios” but rather “a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast” (1998, 109). More emphatically, the conclusion of Homo Sacerstresses the fact that “[e]very attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with the clear awareness that we no longer know anything of the classical distinction between zoe and bios” (187). To evoke Theodor Adorno, we could say that bare life, not only the referent but also the effect of sovereign violence, is damaged life, stripped of its political significance, of its specific form of life.

Tina Kinsella.

In Precarious Life: Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler suggests that recognising a primary human bodily vulnerability is ‘crucial to understanding the basis of  non-violent responses to injury and, perhaps most important, to a theory of collective responsibility’ (2006b, p. 44). Butler’s claim was made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in New York and suggests that the human subject is fundamentally formed in relations of dependency and is hence structured by (quote) a ‘common human vulnerability, one that emerges with life itself’ (2006b, p. 31). This primordial vulnerability, which is a bodily (quote) ‘condition of being laid bare from the start,’ cannot, Butler insists, be recovered as it ‘precedes the formation of “I”’ (2006b, p. 31). However, despite the irrecoverability of this primary condition of vulnerability, Butler argues that the fact that the human being is formed in relation to it necessitates that we speculate on the formation of the subject.

Observational Realism Talk can be downloaded here as a pdf

Semiurgy is the art of creating new signs and sign systems, as opposed to semiotics as the science of signs, and rhetoric as the effective usage of signs. The word ‘semiurge’ would mean an artisan of signs, the demiurge is the creator of the world.”

–Mikhail Epstein

“Sémiurgie (semiurgy) is a French neologism which came into use in the early 1970s in discourses concerned with mass mediated environments. Part sign (semi[o]-) and part work (-urgy), the concept often appears today alongside other identifying features of postmodernity, especially its purported depthlessness and nihilism.”

–Gary Genosko

“…the sign itself is a new source of power. We are…living in a ‘radical semiurgy’…in which production and the commodity have lost their earlier power and given way to the power of signs and simulations.”

–Tony Fitzgerald

“Modernity thus centered on the production of things — commodities and products — while postmodernity is characterized by radical semiurgy, by a proliferation of signs.”

–Douglas Kellner

Black Cinema House hosts screenings and discussions of films by and about people of the African diaspora, and offers video classes to neighborhood youth, teaching the next generation to make their own films and tell their own stories.Cinema House | a Rebuild Foundation project.