many recognise to be the crisis of the anthropocentric subject. Perhaps ascertaining the paradoxical dimension of modern scientific thought could afford a better grasp of the complexity of this process.
from the vision/reason body to the
environmental body: latin american cultural singularities marcos hill
(version by anthony doyle)
The month’s immersion offered by the Pintura além da pintura [Painting beyond Painting] workshop made me more alert to the relations that exist between various issues in art, painting, culture, and politics and which constitute possibilities for the relativisation of already-acquired and institutionally crystallised knowledge. Among the problems raised by the pictorial practice in question was that proposed by the English painter Avis Newman concerning borders and boundaries. There is much to be drawn from this angle, if taken in the spirit of broadening the understanding of painting in the present day. To this end we can take recourse to a historical memory that, rooted in Western culture, affords some revealing perceptions. A recurring problematic in the analysis of borders, limits, and frontiers has always been that of location, infiltrated in various layers of consciousness, permeated with senses of time, space, and reality. Location rouses friction between the body and its surroundings, and this friction engenders sensations and thoughts steeped in memory, feeling, and imagination from which artistic expression can result. It is not hard to recognise that convergences between the corporeal and existence itself define artistic production through experiences garnered from uninterrupted being in the world. One of the points that interests me in this process is to understand the cultural invention of this body; that of the artist and those of the work and the observer, as well as the innumerable other bodies of which the surroundings are made. Historically, we are bound to a bodily construction that, since the dawn of modernity, has consummated corporeality through an age-old conjunction between vision and reason. It is well known that this vision/reason body was a determining factor in the consolidation of the scientific apparatus in whose glow capitalism basks and, consequently, in the creation of nation States accelerated by the industrial revolution. The development of optics is, therefore, a necessary reference when it comes to understanding the human-turned-subject, an idealised cognitive self that craves power and unlimited control over nature. It was through this scientific system that man discovered the roundness of the Earth and the unceasing movement of a universe only recently understood as infinite. It was through that same system that methodologies were devised that could prove the existence of innumerable other worlds micro, macro, molecular, and atomic. From the dizzying gulf between the will to control through knowledge and the implacable relativity of the real came what
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As scientific endeavour perfected its reading of the real, the desire for power imposed its obsession, driven by the threat of a loss of control by a knowledge system whose own development had, with increasing regularity, seen it run up against the very impossibility of control. Rationalist scientific theory efficiently conjured a legitimisation of the body based exclusively on vision and reason. To this day, that legitimisation remains a determinant in the apprehension of both scientific and artistic reality. On the other hand, the legitimising institutions of bourgeois constitutional States still resist the urgent need to deconstruct this body, preferring instead to make it prevail at all costs. In this sense, Avis Newman’s approach to the dimensionality of borders and boundaries in the visual field has made it possible to question the automatisms naturalised in artistic production, elucidating the difference between space, as a strictly rational and optical construction, and the environment, as the experience of a body defined by its synaesthetic capacity. Faced with the debate Newman proposed on what lies ‘beyond painting’, it was possible to detect the impasses the permanence of the vision/reason body caused in the way many of the participants viewed the event. As they strove to produce ‘paintings’ beyond their conventional two-dimensional bounds, bodily understanding of environmental three-dimensionality arose as a new difficulty.
None of the attempts considered perception as stemming from interconnected corporeal senses. The surroundings continued to be perceived as space rather than as environment; simply as the result of two-dimensional compositions with little connection to the three-dimensionality posited by the proposed perceptual expansion.
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Unconsciously, the flat borders and boundaries of the canvas were maintained in ambiences that would have allowed for other types of approach. Instead of sensorial speculation, formal and chromatic compositional procedures were repeated almost automatically, as if the environmental reality were just another blank canvas, and this prevented a better apprehension of the place as a potential ‘support’. It is a fact that Brazilian art schools have favoured access to references that proclaim the need for corporeal redimensioning in image production. Through the artistic propositions of Western artists, at least from Cézanne on, including the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Clark, synaesthetic restlessness has pulled towards new procedures with a view to deconstructing the dictatorial retinal tradition. However, what was seen during the ‘Painting beyond Painting’ seminar was that various contemporary body issues have still not found resonance in the most immediate way of thinking and producing art. There is little application of emancipating references, which tend to be reduced to mere theoretical citations, elegant no doubt, but all but absent in practice. Ever since the experiment proposed by Newman, the retina continues to prevail as the core paradigm in the formation of image professionals.
11/9/10 10:47:49 AM