by
theodoros zafeiropoulos
In
a thematic register this exhibition explores the term “failure”.
It is centered on localizing and producing symptomatic examples that
speak for the evaluation of the artistic practice (work) as “doomed”
not to meet a premeditated, desired or sought-for target. The
participating artists were invited by the yardstick of the
pluralistic contribution of thinking and problematizing about both
the genealogy of the work and their proper stance on practice. A
prime concern has been to assemble unexpected studying versions able
to cover and broaden the spectrum of the field outlined by the term
“failure”.
The
main context of this exhibition is to elucidate and showcase the
intrinsic and extrinsic factors that affect the conception, the
design, and the materialization of the work of Art and the
Architecture. The reasons that may lead to any kind of
off-target/failure are, for the most part, interwoven with the phase,
the level, the adequacy and the intentional direction of design, the
random factors that arose or arise in failure, with possible
shortages or omissions during the construction-materialization as
well as the further or subsequent use, non less than with some
dysfunctions and arbitrary shifts of meaning areas, epistemological
misunderstandings and erroneous formulations. But, above all, the
results of any dysfunction are drawn through introspective
observation and conceptualized as a mechanism – a construction –
of a collecting depositor1
(space), within which any emerging factor has to be decoded,
validated and archived, according to a methodology of relational
disposition. The main objective here is to approach the conceptual
elements that produce or dissimulate similarities, with the further
purpose of discovering real affinities between artworks (construed as
examples) and surrounding events.
“I
see the similar”, in the Aristotelian version2,
means that I apprehend the “identical” inside in and regardless
of the “difference”, for the further purpose of correlating or
schematizing a new meaning. Thus, the semantic benefit is inseparable
from the categorical assimilation through which it is schematized, as
far as it remains trapped in the conflict of the “identical” and
the “different”, although it is the rough draft, as a request for
information by means of the “notion”.
Between
the two poles of subjective success and failure lies a space able to
host potentially productive activities, within which the paradoxical
rules and the eventual doctrines are rejected. Descartes3
recognized two different axiological substances, res cogitans and res
extensa, which basically correspond to the relation subject-object,
signifier-signified. The off-target/failure is joined together with
notions such as “mistake”, “error”, “incomplete”,
“unfinished”, while it defines moments of thinking that elude
consensus, making choices in favor of the multiplication of questions
instead that of answers. The abstract and, simultaneously, multiple
possibilities offered by the monitoring of the process sequence is
further reinforced by the problems and obstacles of physical
materialization4,
maintaining a perpetual struggle with ideas, hylomorphism,
representation and support of every norm and definition, since to
manage materiality is a major hindrance with regard to definite
decision-making and, by extension, any kind of teleological
constructability. One seeks for useful and efficient criteria, able
to judge the success or failure of a situation, which are
characterized on their own as a new condition – “an important
work” – while they maybe serve as the major –already codified–
factor of reflection. Under this generalizing pronunciation,
off-target/failure comes forth as a “special” function, which, on
one occasion, would operate as a “non-return check valve” and, on
another occasion, under a more specialized consideration, would
individually be the “new” work.
The
failed promises that, in the name of evolution, were proposed as “the
avant-garde myths” (“To be an artist is to fail as no other dare
to fail” as S. Beckett put it) lead us to realize – in arts –
how apparently impossible is to be absolutely certain about the
extent, the safety and the stability of the eventual working surface.
This historic and widely used quote schematizes for us here two
important aspects: courage as a (visual) condition to treat failure,
and the invited (artistic) occupation as failure through the
conventional attitude that art and failure cannot be considered
separately. The American sociologist R. Sennett calls “a great
taboo of modernity” the failure of a society to achieve success and
progress; correspondingly, the futility of Sisyphus’s punishment –
as self-assertion – lies in the quest for liberation and dignity
through the affirmation of the absurd as a recurrent failure. While
in rationalistic theory success is considered to be the overvalued
good, in post-war Art and Architecture, doubt has embraced
experimentation, encouraging a line of thinking that “risk” is to
be recognized as a viable strategy.
The
role of the creator in this “un-stable” working environment is to
respond to the need for creation or to creation according to a
definite series of general guidelines (prescriptions), which
sometimes preexist (meaning that she is obliged to follow them) and
sometimes are presented in the course of materialization (mainly as
imponderable factors). The ensuing product, program or creation must
be functional and, simultaneously, quite flexible, so that it can at
any moment be reconstructed and modified on an unexpected
eventuality, as a response to something given or amidst a possible
failed application. Thus, the creator makes use of a mechanism of
“intentional assumption”5,
being receptive to eventual conditions that step in the content of
her object. She is receptive to behave in an active and yet risky way
during the process of producing her work, without getting absorbed or
crashed by the work. This intention, the way Wittgenstein6
delineated it, utilizes the sign in thought. The intention seems to
interpret, to give the definite interpretation. It does not give yet
another sign but something Other. Through that spectrum, the
off-target/failure comes forth as an insatiable material, which puts
to risk all of the activities, the desire for autarchy,
self-affirmation and self-validation.
The
subject faces the “entropy” of the process and struggles to let
the truth of the event play out, unfold any of its random or
conscious aspects, in the prospect of either encapsulating or staging
a network of conclusions. It wants to include “aspects of
problematizing” in words, forms, structures and meanings, without
restricting its powers unilaterally through the suppressive violence
of representations. The subject of foundation (the potential creator)
searches for structures with the purpose of allowing its
constructions (Art, Architecture, poem, thought, economy, form of
government) to ally with forces that have catalyzing effects in the
course of moving from the non-existed to the existed, from the
familiar to the unfamiliar, and from the idea to the spatial
conception. It risks coming closer to what poses the greatest threat
to them, for the purpose of facing the totality of the process
sequence in a way that any step can take into account, control, and
lend an ear to any form of contingency. Jacques Rancière7
describes the occupation with art as a way of intellectual
emancipation, laying great emphasis on the catalyzing duality
creator-spectator. “To be a spectator does not constitute a passive
condition that ought to be transformed into activity. It is our usual
condition. We learn and teach, act and know as spectators too, since
every moment we relate what we see with to what we have seen and said
(the ineffable).”
The
off-target/failure as a formulated condition thus becomes visible by
shifting the center of gravity from the idiosyncratic position of the
artist to the artwork itself, from the relation between the artwork
with its spectator and the internal analysis of the artwork, to the
potential “truth” it entails. It is a condition that leaves aside
“the Aristotelian notion of Reality”8,
by avoiding revelatory or intuitive ontologies. Taking distances from
the target is achieved through adopting the attitude of a biologist
par excellence, who cannot stop wondering about the bearer of
thinking and, as the case may be, for the nature of practice itself.
The subjectivity of “aiming at a target” is attributed, according
to the exquisite analysis by Ricœur, to the idea of “categorical
transgression”, a process that enables us to enrich the deviation
implied in the process of transposition. In other words, there is a
continuous referral of the signified, which is nonetheless produced
due to its differentiation from other signifieds. The traits that
could establish the meaning of off-target/failure can be considered
to be absolutely “absent” in case they constitute declaratory
components. The consequence, according to Derrida9,
is that we can never, in any case of an imp-pass, have an established
and definable present meaning. The relations of interaction by the
yardstick of such a condition of alteration, which analyze individual
parts of the work and unavoidably enter into its content, are those
that shape the sequence, and, above all, provide clues for the
“mechanisms involved”. A. Badiou, seeking for an ontological
determination of the “being of the event”10,
postulates a theory of “multiplicity” that is heterogeneous with
regard to the one that justifies being as being. This position
reveals that the event is the very nodal point through which we
ensure that all things are not mathematizable11.
What “happens” now as a managing weakness forms a fold between
the ecstatic unfolding and the intensive continuum, a theoretical
position suggesting that an event is literally an un-founded
multiplicity; the abandonment of the foundation makes it a purely
random supplement.
The
works for which we stand by, with reflections on such a complicated
handling, do not produce only logically consistent conclusions but
also hybrid models that simulate the invited off-target/failure. The
simulation (of failures) is one of the most important and powerful
methods, used in researches on designing and monitoring the operation
of complex processes and systems. According to R.E. Shannon12,
simulation is defined as the process of designing the model of a real
system and experimenting with that model. They aim to understand the
behavior of the system and/or evaluate alternative strategies for its
operation, i.e. results arising from the change of the system as a
whole or its way of self-healing. Its mechanism (autopoiesis) refers
to the self-reproduction or autopoetic organization of the system,
which the Chilean biologists H. Maturana and F. Varela13
have described as the most inherent process of uninterrupted
reproduction, being in fact a product of evolutionary cellular
(biochemical) relations and variations. Each act (as the beginning of
practice) is depended on the inscribed in the “DNA of practice”
ways the creator acts, on inherent socio-biological limitations, and
on the technical means of assistance she has conquered so that she
supports them.
Paraphrasing
Walter Benjamin: the criteria for evaluating conclusions are produced
by a “here and now” and are “coincidental” – i.e. they can
be interpreted only “dynamically” and not based on stable
parameters. Therefore, each activity of supplementing has great
importance in the description of the event, since it emerges during
experience under the form of an “intuitive re-action” or as a
form of momentary or intuitive appreciation of an important “truth”.
In the case of a conventional fold, a double theory of multiplicities
is postulated, a theory inherited from the theory of Bergson, where
an event is always the divergence between two heterogeneous
multiplicities. In both these cases, conflicts and resistances are
solved not due to knowledge itself but due to the fact that this
knowledge facilitates a special experience during which “conflicts
acquire meaning”14,
take on a consistent and organized form, which at the end enables
their free evolution and, thus, their solution. It follows that the
operation of one of the powers of the mind has to be inhibited so
that another one is put in motion or, in a more conventional
formulation, that more sensitive sensory organs, able to perceive the
singular moment where things enter a more variable trajectory, get
activated. A. Camus, from the point of view of literature, considers
the irrationality of the above duality in the sense of the
contradictory, of the illogical. He sees logic not in the thinker but
in the one who feels logically, linking it up to the teleological
notion of suicide as a redemptive outlet of purifying completion.
The
narrative function of failures regulates and normalizes the “march
of description” of any form of weakness that interrupts/pervades
practice. As M. Heidegger suggests,15
“It is not a matter of assimilating understanding and
interpretation to a particular ideal of knowledge which is itself
only a degeneration of understanding that has strayed into the
legitimate grasping what is objectively present in its essential
unintelligibility.” The dire necessity of formulating specific but
also alternative proposals for shifting from the obvious reality to
another – which will instill life to ruins and claim a deliberate
switch and an erudite deviation from the target – calls for an
all-embracing consideration of problems, which surpasses the
otherwise necessary impression of the failures that have caused them,
as an intellectual digging up for unearthing a “new finding”.
Besides, in the depths of any construction of anything “built”,
there is this primitive desire to “trace” a new path, as a
beginning, an unrolling or a winding. At the exact opposite, the
eventuality of a conscious lack of target (off-target), as an
area-version of process in-sequence (with regard to the “ongoing
activities”), moves into the domain of judging the result through
an empirical appreciation that monitors and records events under way,
in a time parallel to the time of the production/elicitation process
of the work. It is delineated as a parallel universe, able to reveal
and function as a communication channel for grasping the duality of
the terms “failure-success”.
The
basic matter in hand is to explain the simultaneous changes taken
place in the “continuity of the human activity”16,
the resistance of structures in the frame of a fluid practice, the
relation between activity and interaction, in localizing the powers
of inaction and transformation of forms. According to a Hegelian
reading of the anthropological practice of Bourdieu17,
the analysis of praxis is moving from recording, describing the
empirically concrete, the immediate given to the primary experience
(the sensory perception of the whole) towards an abstraction, as a
negation of the sensory immediacy in the formation of abstract
concepts, which apprehend universal types, inevitable laws laid down
for all individual cases, and shapes as “mutilated” sequences.
The movement is completed through a composition, as a reflecting
representation of the internal nexus of the studied object and of the
unity of its various parts; as a closedown of uncertainty in a
unifying apprehension of the determinations and the inevitable laws
that govern every phenomenon as a whole. Through that prism, we can
discern some similarities with the psychoanalytic function of
symbolism and even resort to references to the work by numerous
scholars, whose interventions open the way of connecting Lacan with
the political/politics of practice; a space that reveals the nature
of a straitened field, which remains for the most part a “no man’s
land”, since this field is absolutely self-referential and seeks
for outlets on the inside, through working around to questions by
analyzing internal conflicts.
By
focusing both theoretically and practically on the meaning of
off-target/failure, this exhibition and the relevant conference will
attempt to formulate alternative, unexpected ways of opening up
finite states with regard to the production of visual and
architectural works. The sought for shifting18
lies not in handling but in producing a virtual “kind” of
target/objective. Any “kind” of off-target/failure is dealt with
in the same frame along with brevity, surprise, dissimulation,
enigma, wit, antithesis and all the other handlings serving the same
objective. The shifting achieved makes them infinitely necessary
through a continuous reduction and explanation of every “targeted
metaphor”19
and every total of similarities, which, both at a textual and a
practical level, will be the “tool” that will ensure our access
to the distinction of certain conclusions inside the duality
“empirical knowledge” and “metaphorical dilemma”. The above
questions, indicative of the complexity and vari-formity of art,
reveal that the artistic practice constitutes a complicated field of
applying heteroclite forces, the crossbreeding of which creates each
time the particular “atmosphere” of a work. This collection and
showcase of visual representations, mediations, fiction20
and juxtapositions will attempt to examine and define this duality,
by bringing off/target-failure in the center of interest as a
perspective for an expanded productive process.
I think that the term “depositor” here is very near to the term
“toponomology” introduced by Derrida. This term includes the
complicated relation of the archive to the place where it is kept
and the authority, the power. This relation describes the
intersection of “topological”, “place”, “law”,
“substrate” and “authority”, during which an installation
scene becomes visible and yet invisible. See Derrida, Archive
Fever,
transl. K. Papagiorgis, Ekkremes, Athens 1996, p. 45.
“(…) each truth discovered was a rule available in sciences (and
I trust that what is contained in this volume I will show that I
have found some), I can declare that they are but the the discovery
of subsequent ones. (…) As for myself, if I have succeeded in
discovering any truths in the consequences and results of five or
six principal difficulties which I have surmounted, and my
encounters with which I reckoned as battles in which victory
declared for me.” Descartes,
Discourse on method,
Part II, Part 4.
“The fabricated object is described by Aristotle as the product of
a strategic process: the conception of the target by the creator
sets up a process of thinking as for the suitable form of execution.
To the degree that the creator commands her Art, the conception of
the target defines the selection of the matter that would better
serve this target as well as the suitable shaping of the matter.”
K. Mpatinakis, “The artistic value of conceptual Art” in Vaso
Kintis (ed.), Philosophy
and art,
Okto, Athens 2011, p. 32.
“What we call ‘understanding a language’ is often like the
understanding we get of a calculus when we learn its history or its
practical application. And there too we meet an easily surveyable
symbolism instead of one that is strange to us. (…) In this case
‘to understand’ means something like ‘to take in as a whole’.”
See Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Grammar,
transl. K.
Kovaios, MIET, Athens 2010, p. 70.
Jacques Rancière (2008), The
Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation,
transl. Dafni Mpounanos, Nisos, Athens 2008.
“The suggestion that we can act against opinion but not against
knowledge is at once set aside; it will not help us to solve our
difficulty, for opinion may be accompanied by as great a feeling of
certainty as knowledge, Aristotle’s own solution is offered in
successive stages: (a) The familiar distinction between potentiality
and actuality is drawn; it may be possible to act wrongly if you
have the knowledge of the right at the back of your mind, though it
would be impossible if you were actually knowing the right at the
moment. This is a genuine contribution to the solution; its defect
for Aristotle lies in the fact that it does not distinguish between
the various items of knowledge which according to his theory are
involved in knowing what you ought to do.” See W. D. Ross,
Aristotle,
transl. M. Mitsou, MIET, Athens 2010, p. 315
Jacques Derrida, Writing
and Difference,
transl. K.
Papagiorgis, Kastaniotis, Athens 2003, p. 221.
“Benjamin Peirce: ‘Mathematics is the science that draws
necessary conclusions’ (1881), Α.
Ν.
Whitehead: ‘Mathematics in its widest significance is the
development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning’
(1898), and Bertrand Russell: ‘Pure mathematics is the class of
all propositions of the form 'p implies q' where p and q are
propositions...” 1903, are indicative of the conclusions reached
by the vast majority of the mathematical community in the early 20th
century.” See R. L. Wilder, Evolution
of mathematical concepts,
Koutsoumpos, Athens 1986, p. 127-128.
Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela, The
tree of knowledge,
transl. S. Manouselis, Katoptro, Athens 1992, p. 71-80.
See the critical comments by Alexander Nehamas in “What an Author
is”, Journal
of Philosophy
83/11, 1986, 685-91.
See M. Heidegger, Being
and Time,
transl. Y. Tzavaras, Athens 1978, p. 256. For an analysis of truth
in Heidegger as “unconcealment” and the role of Dasein in its
“discoverdness”, see Being
and Time,
op. cit., p. 335-357. See also The
Origin of the Work of Art,
transl. Y. Tzavaras, Dodoni, Athens 1986, ch. 2 and 3, where
Heidegger treats the relation between art and truth, and more
specifically the role of Dasein, “preservation” (Bewahrung), and
the preservers, p. 110-120.
De Landa, Μ.
(1997), A
Thousand Years of Nonlinear History,
transl. M. Vainas, Kritiki, Athens 2002, p. 459.
R. Scruton, “European philosophy from Fichte to Sartre”, in
Kenny Anthony, History
of Western Philosophy,
transl. D.
Rissakis,
Nefeli,
Athens
2005, p.
277-292. D.
Patelis, “ascent from the abstract to the concrete”,
Philosophical
and Sociological Dictionary,
Kapopoulos, Athens 1995, p. 72-73.
P. Ricœur, The
rule of metaphor,
op. cit., p. 17: “By linking fiction and redescription in this
way, we restore the full depth of meaning to Aristotle’s discovery
in the Poetics, which was that the poiêsis of language arises out
of the connection between muthos and mimêsis. From this conjunction
of fiction and redescription I conclude that the ‘place’ of
metaphor, its most intimate and ultimate abode, is neither the name,
nor the sentence, nor even discourse, but the copula of the verb to
be. The metaphorical ‘is’ at once signifies both ‘is not’
and ‘is like.’ If this is really so, we are allowed to speak of
metaphorical truth, but in an equally ‘tensive’ sense of the
word ‘truth’.”
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου