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Friday, December 07, 2007 from 2:00 PM - 6:00 PM (GMT)
Body
Art puts another human body in your lap in live performance,
photographic document or on screen image. It has often struggled to
find an audience. It asks what it is to be human and what is it to be
humane. In this workshop we will examine our own responses,
responsibilities and complicities in relation to a range of historical
and contemporary artists' work, including Chris Burden, Gina Pane,
Bruce Gilchrist, Marcus Coates, He Yun Chang and Mark Raidpere. We will
consider our responses in relation to differing modes of proximity as
viewers of live performances, photographic documents and on screen
images.
We will examine a range of
theoretical positions on the issues of empathy and responsibility. In
the 1930s psychologist Paul Schilder argued for a shared ontology
between bodies, claiming that ‘the laws of identification and of
communication between images of the body make one’s suffering and pain
everybody’s affair’. Does Rosalind Krauss’ contention of an aesthetics
of narcissism which she applied to video in the 1970s apply to the
digital now? Kathy O’Dell’s critical work explores the notion of a
contract of complicity between artist and audience. For Nelly Richard
the body is ‘the meeting place between the individual and the
collective … the boundary between biology and society, between drives
and discourses’. Philosopher Elaine Scarry has demonstrated how the
body has the status of being our most definite material reference point
and is therefore used to give substance to ideologies or to take it
away. The body has been the site of both ideological control and
resistance.
Digital technologies have been a key influence in bringing the embodied
consciousness and a metaphysics of the body back into focus. What
qualities of human interaction are enabled or disabled by digital
technologies? If our contemporary co-existence in both real and digital
habitats is increasingly removing the distinction between real and
fictional or simulated, fantasy and fact, how is that affecting our
values? The computer or TV screen turns the live human into a digital
object, an avatar. The digital tends to the specular, the solitary, the
pornographic, the onanistic, the commodity. Can we play responsibly
with each other in the digital domain?
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