Man Ray, Back to Reason, 1923

 

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Summary

I intend to show how mediation practices invite the encounter with the work as a reconstructive reading experience. This process can be understood as an ethical experience of recognition, involving aesthetic form and social contradiction. The ethical function of discourse, concentrated on the notion of letter, determines modes of relationship with the work that are also models of intersubjective relationship with the other. I present this theme based on seven ethical challenges for contemporary museums.

 

6. Construction of Historical Series and Critical Reading of Images

 

So far we are deviating from the classic image reading operators: the author and the work. Criticism of the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s insisted on the dissolution of the unity of these categories: the work is open, its discontinuity with the world is problematic, its intrusion into life is an insoluble problem. A related problem is the reaction to the excess of biographism and psychologization of reading the work through the life of its author. The subject that is criticized here is above all the sovereign subject, self-identical and reflective, possessor and master of his production just as Hitchcock seemed to control all the details of his films.

Now, this use of psychoanalysis brings out its worst aspect, which is the reproduction of a master narrative from which one can make hermeneutics of works of art. To some extent this seems to be inevitable, but what is observed in more recent critics, such as Didi-Huberman and Hal Foster or Kosalind Krauss, is that psychoanalysis is above all a strategy for reading forms, not contents.

 

She, like so many other discourses and experiences, is centrally interested in suffering and transformation, in the way in which living contradictions, such as trauma, but also the narcissistic suffering with identity, the suffering in estrangement with the symptom, the suffering derived from the blockage, failure or limitation of our work of imagination or symbolization returns as real.

This is the central problem in the aforementioned series of paintings about the Cesium 137 disaster and its interpolation in the continuum of works and Siron Franco. The guiding thread does not have to be life, but it can just be the recurrence, constructed by the recipient of the variations that are composed in time. As the anthropophagy of your early works, does it come together with the response to the terrorist attacks in Paris, or the disaster in Goiânia? We don't need to find a logic, a coherence or a necessary chain, as Wolflin and Vasari did. But an empathic listening to the work will produce, as a sort of secondary effect, structures of unity, superimposed or not, on the structures of identity.

This is the open exercise of reading as the construction of political bodies. A task in which psychoanalysis, museological thought, but also so many other discourses and assemblages are grouped.

 


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