More student projects

Our seminar has concluded and is over and done. But I'll still post a few more things from the members of our blog. Last week was about Anne Cecile Desjardin. This entry is about Zoe Yeh and also Šárka Teleka.

Zoe Yeh was an assistant to the curator of the show in the Kuandu Fine Arts Museum, the little one in the ex-cafe on the 2nd floor. The show is about site-specific art, and interestingly invited several "outsider" people to install something, custom crafted for this specific site. By "outsider" I mean that they are not professional artists, and some are not even art students. But they all have a strong interest in art and at least some background in the field. Zoe assisted this show from the beginning of the long process, and she also wrote a review or a kind of curatorial overview of this titled "Project: a Possibility of Site-specific Art". She wrote this in both Chinese and English, accompanied with photos of the 8 installations. You can ask Zoe for a copy of her overview, if you haven't already seen it in the museum.

Šárka Teleka sends news that she's almost finished with a Czech translation of Agamben's essay "What is the Contemporary?" You might remember way back to the very beginning of our seminar, I used this as a kind of beginning. (If you can't remember, look in our photocopy packet at the first item.) While many teachers used to deal with the question of "What is Art?", instead I insisted that this is no longer a problem, or at least not my question. But if you want to talk about what we talk about when we talk about "Contemporary Art", then the more interesting and surprisingly deep problem is "what is really contemporary?". Šárka plans to submit her translation to an art magazine in Prague. I hope she sends me a copy when it is published, even though I can't read Czech any more than I can read Chinese. But it will cheer me up!

This translation of Agamben appears to be part of a larger project. Šárka and Juliana Höschlová have been working on a project titled: 田, Field, Políčko Art in Asia / numer 1 / Taiwan - Taipei
Their blog about their project -- http://xxfieldxx.blogspot.com/2010/01/english.html

So, congratulations to these three students, who are professional-izing themselves in very smart ways.

The imperfect language of art

La muette parle
Ceci est L’imperfection de l’art
Ce language obscur
--Paul Eluard

[my English version:]

The mute speaks
This is the imperfection of art
This obscure language
----------------------------

A Chinese version of Eluard's little poem is on the sign in this photo of Anne Cecile Desjardi. Her art project was to hold this sign on busy streets in Taipei while waiting for passersby to ask her questions or interact with her, despite the barriers of translation and nationality. On the other side of her sign is another French quote rendered into Chinese. But this well-known quote was detourned or altered as: "I shop, therefore I am."

While of course most people rushed by and avoided the artist, a few actually did stop and enter into a discussion with her -- sometimes even a longer discussion that moved on to a cafe. This latter aspect of her street performance is why I connected it to Bourriaud's "relational aesthetics".

Photos of Ranciere visit

Erick and Hongjohn give Ranciere a hard time, just so he
doesn't get bored.



Zian & fiance present Ranciere with a brown bag full of invisible love.


Ranciere visited us at TNUA. Here are some memories. In this group, I see several seminar members, left to right: Sarka, Juliana, Anne, Zian, Naomi, and Zoe. (Photographer unknown. If this is your photo, please let me know so I can give you credit.)

Your final project

TNUA reminded me to turn in your grades before January 22. So I'm reminding you that on the class syllabus is this assignment:
'The other part of earning credit for this course is to turn in a project. Many different kinds of projects are possible. Meet with me at least once during the semester to discuss and negotiate more specifically what project you will do. It can be a traditional seminar paper, or a curatorial statement, or a video, or portfolio, or a critique of a performance, or an installation, or . . . ? I will ask that every project makes some explicit connection to our seminar that I can see.

So, again, your final project is flexible and open to all kinds of different things, but you should check it out with me first just to make sure it's OK. I'm only asking that you articulate a single connection to any theory we studied. Since we have no class on 1/1 New Year's Day, then we still have 2 classes in the weeks after that. You can email to me any time meanwhile. Also, I'm still waiting for more of your comments here on the blog. Your final grade depends upon your weekly contributions to the seminar, plus your oral presentation to the class, plus your final project.

Happy New Year, and see you next year!

Relational Aesthetics

This week we will continue on our schedule to talk about "affect". But meanwhile . . . -->

Thanks to Zian (a.k.a. "PainFreeKitten" !?) we now have scanned in the readings from the inventor of "Relational Aesthetics". Nicolas Bourriaud is an influential art critic and curator in Paris, but also now in London curating the Tate.

You can download what Bourriaud wrote here:

http://www.4shared.com/file/169436328/5798cbf4/Relational_Asethetics_by_Bourr.html

It is 12 pages to print out.

Affect

Our topic for the next few readings is about the theory of "affect".
To begin, I'll note that this term is used in various ways, and that the dictionary will probably not help much! In standard English, "affect" is usually a verb. But in the theory we're reading it is a noun: an affect, the affects. Don't confuse this with "effect" though. "Effect" is indeed a noun in standard English, but it is a different noun for something that resulted from a cause. Instead, as we will see later, an affect can itself be a cause.

In psychology, affect refers to the expression of emotions, rather than to a person's feelings. This is because in some conditions, the emotional expression doesn't match the feelings: e.g., frowning when you feel happy. Or, smiling when you feel angry. Notice that the individual subjectivity is not the affect, but rather a kind of unconscious expression is the affect.

In contemporary theory, affect is something like that. Notice the detachment from personal, individual conscious feelings. But let's go a step further: affects are pre-individual (like many little parts of you that you might not consciously control) yet also trans-individual (they are able to influence other people and spread or communicate or they might originate outside of individuals, such as in music). Affects affect us, but often without our conscious will, perhaps without our awareness.

Here's a French & English translation:

Feeling (English) = Sentiment (French)
Affect = L'affect

As you read, you'll soon discover a lot of implications and complications about this term. To begin it is useful to note that Deleuze defines art as creating percepts and affects.

3 artists on Rancière

• Liam Gillick
  
• Paul Chan
• Thomas Hirschhorn

And also:
Interview with Rancière: Art of the Possible
Fulvia Carnevale, John Kelsey. Artforum. March 2007.