Artists participating:
Terry Atkinson, Diann Bauer, Roger Cremers,
Shezad Dawood, Jimmie Durham, Doug Fishbone,
Liam Gillick, Richard Hoeck, Edgar Honetschlager,
Hilary Koob-Sassen, Liane Lang, Wolfe Lenkiewicz
(T1/2 Space),
Rut Blees Luxemburg, Goshka Macuga (with Lali Chetwynd),
Tom McCarthy (International Necronautical Society),
Bruce McLean, Warren Neidich
(artbrain.org),
Klaus Pobitzer, Mathias Poledna, Walid Ra'ad
(Atlas Group), ®edux,
Alain Robbe-Grillet, Martin Sexton,
Jalal Toufic, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Mark Aerial Waller
Invitation:
You are cordially invited to attend the opening of "Go Between"
curated by Dr Wolfgang Fetz & Peter Lewis at the Palais Thurn &
Taxis and Magazin4, Bregenzer Kunstverein,
Austria, on Saturday July 16th. commencing at
11.00am.
Press Release:
®edux / Bregenzer Kunstverein, Go Between:
Introduced by Wolfgang Fetz and Peter Lewis
"The Go Between" is a film by Joseph Losey scripted by Harold
Pinter, taken from a book by L.P.
Hartley [1] that follows the tragic consequences of an
'unlawful' relationship and its irrevocable effect on
the Go Between himself.
The term is applicable to many situations. A curator is not unlike the boy in the film
delivering messages between clandestine lovers. He or she may appear to do something like
this, but in the universal sense [going between many things
and peoples and 'arranging' new configurations between
art, love, politics and technology,
enacted through indirect, often inexplicable chance encounters.]
The curator, like the philosopher, is also a
co-worker in the process of the art, so can be
nominated. Art, without doubt,
goes between certain of its task to initiate new discourses of the subject.
The materiality of universalism is the militant dimension of every truth, which is invoked in
the action brought about by philosophy, achieved between differences and by
'militant' actions, [philosophy
is not itself a truth].
Unity of thought and action is expressed in the form
'not...but'. The Go Between does
not have to be [ontologically speaking] a
being, but an act, in equal and divided terms,
all at the same time. Disconnected from the 'statist'
law of the situation by an indifference to it, the Go Between addresses a truth to
everyone, thereby universalising its subject. The law is
inescapable yet must be broken with.
A curator also cannot alone anticipate the truth procedures of singular works of art, which
'refuse' their subjective paths from the law
[i.e.] of,
say, Capital, which gives
'life' to desire yet kills any thought of liberation of our desire
from it. The subject, caught in between,
may liberate an unnameable potential.
An 'event'. Is not the Go
Between, [e.g] the central character
in Losey's film, therefore the subject,
if it can initiate and form its own discourse?
In a profound gratuity the Go Between moves in the realms of Art, Politics,
Science and in the most powerful endeavour, Love, to deliver the universal
address. These certain works proceed and are maintained into a
'non-literal'
law. Nothing is stated as a fact, but may occur,
or be witnessed, without explanation. The impossibility of saying something
here is the emblem for an expressive gap: the undramatic achievement of the Go Between remains undisclosed
in order to invigorate the unthought and inactive.
So a newspaper, for example, comprising photographs and writings that
assume the authority and communication of a 'statist'
law, can be painted and written over to open up a new discourse, not of the
letter and its literal content. By revealing the conviction in a truth concealed,
the 'non-literal' process is consistent with
another law:
[ Events ]
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the one that, by addressing the concealed
truth, rather than contradicting, what is performed is a subjective victory
over the powerlessness of thought. Something is happening 'out
there' or 'in there' which cannot be
singled out, other than through the subjective gesture.
The works selected follow 'non-literal'
law. In locating these artworks that, whilst utilising existing systems
of knowledge in their 'inaesthetic'
[2] variations, artists and curators alike
, equally so all of us, may uncover a universal truth in the evental process
of going between forms, contents, and their particular
structures. Something like Lacan's variation of the
'cogito', "I think therefore I am"
applies: "There where I think, I am not,
and there where I am, I do not think". The confusion itself performs a
liberation. As Jimmie Durham has once said " ...surely we will be
confused". So this curator, at liberty to describe the works
literally, refuses.
This 'supplement' of refusal is committed to chance.
Something is happening.
Even right now as we read between the lines...the Go Between stumbles across chance in the process
of running between orders, the memory of which may expire through the intensity and pleasure of the
journey, but not without thought's active
interference. "Thought can be raised up from its powerlessness only through something that exceeds
the order of thought" [2]. Distinguishing truth from
knowledge, writes Badiou, is essential in this process of the
event.
The act of the Go Between is not the same as that of, say, a
'relational'
aesthetic procedure, which, by delivering messages back to the statist
law, returns them to an institutional role, to an object of knowledge
which obstructs their potential as a singular process of a truth.
What can be rescued? A Go Between uncovers, and yet conceals the
'event', and vice versa, rupturing the
identity and the law of the system by nominating the actuality of an as yet undecidable, incomplete
discourse. As art assumes the task that philosophy has occupied, the
question of facing an indiscernible situation, or situating an independence,
is couched in the terms of proposing a new discourse out of these saturated schemas. This is not a
judgement, but submission to thought. A configuration thinks itself
in the works that compose it, for example between
'incompatible' realms: prostitution
and opera, gang crime and revolution, cinema and
martyrdom, mathematics and desire, terrorism and
comedy, the occult and journalism, as an infinite series
[Art] processed out of real locations and
singularities.
1. The third collaboration between director Joseph Losey and writer
Harold Pinter, following The Servant and Accident, continues their
exploration of class rituals and the darker recesses of desire.
2. Alain Badiou, "Saint
Paul, the Foundation of Universalism" Stanford University
Press, 2003.
3. The project
examines what are termed 'inaesthetic variations', adapted from
the philosopher Alain Badiou to describe a contemporary condition: "...a relation of philosophy to art which, maintaining that art is itself a producer of
truths, makes no claim to turn art into an object for philosophy.
Against aesthetic speculation, inaesthetics describes the strictly intraphilosophical effects
produced by the independent existence of some works of art." Alain
Badiou, "Handbook of Inaesthetics", Stanford University
Press, 2005 (English version)
Go Between link:
www.bregenzerkunstverein.at
Palais Thurn und Taxis
Gallusstra�e 10
A-6900 Bregenz, Austria
Magazin4
Bregenzer Kunstverein . 6900 Bregenz .Bergmannstraße 6
T: +43 5574 410 1511
www.magazin4.at
Mon - Fri 1600 - 1900hr
Sat / Sun 1200 - 1600hr
Contact Bregenzer Kunstverein bkv@bkv.vol.at
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