Month: October 2014

LECTURE 6 CAMP & QUEER AESTHETICS

CAMP

understanding CAMP : is an aesthetic sensibility that regards something as appealing or humorous because of its ridiculousness to the viewer.[1] Camp aesthetics disrupt many modernists’ notions of what art is and what can be classified as high art by inverting aesthetic attributes such as beauty, value and taste through an invitation of a different kind of apprehension and consumption. Such as entertainments like film, cabaret and pantomime.

 

According to the writer, Camp is the love of its unnatural: artifice and exaggeration.

Camp is not really about beauty, but the degree of artifice and of stylisation. It can be discover in objects, and behaviour of persons. Camp eyes has the power to transform experience, but not all the time control by the creator.

Camp Art is often decorative art, emphasising texture, sensuous surface, and style of content. Therefore concert music rarely Camp because it is contentless.

Camp is actually about taste. Taste is a human response, like the in people, visual taste, taste in motion, taste in acts, in morality, intelligence, in ideas. Taste tends to develop very unevenly.

Logic of taste: the consistent Sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste.

A statement from the writer: to perceive CAMP in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. like ‘not a woman, but a “woman”.’

 

 

The great period of Camp was in late 17th and early 18th, period that people have extraordinary feeling for artifice, for surface, for symmetry. Mannerist artist like Pontormo, Rosso and Caravaggio, theatrical painter like Georges de La Tour, Euphuism in literature.

Writer said that when a person / a thing is ‘a camp’, it has produced duplicity. Behind the ‘straight’ public sense, one has found a private weird/zany experience of the thing.

Writing also mentioned that artists that create Camp are unintentional (purposely create it) but they are very serious in their work. For example of the Warner Brothers musicals are not meant to be funny.

The words for camp: Seriousness that fails,   proper mixture of exaggerate, the fantastic, the passionate and the naive,  spirit of extravagance,   innocent,  instant character

‘A work can come close to Camp, but not make it, because it succeeds.’ some works like films were so exaggerate but end up they succeed, if they were a little more ‘off’ they could be great camp.

Camp is considered as among the great creative sensibilities (that with seriousness), the Sensibility of Failed Seriousness. It refuses harmonies of traditional seriousness (the high culture, the high art). Camp: victory of Style over Content, Aesthetics over Morality, Irony over Tragedy.

The whole point of Camp is to remove the power  of serious. It is playful, it involves a new and more complex relation to the serious.

‘The camp insists on not being ‘serious’, like homosexual’s desire to remain youthful.’

What camp does is to find the success in certain passionate failures. Less judgement.

My opinion, Camp is so connected/similar to Failure theories where we find the diamond in shit, find the precious from a trashy/failure works. 

UNDIAGNOSING GENDER

This article was saying that transsexuality is not a disorder, and that trans people need to understand the it is a practice of self-determination, an exercise of autonomy (a condition of self-government). But no one achieves autonomy without the assistance or support of a community in the process of transitioning.

For those transsexual people, some assumes that certain gender norms have not been properly embodied by them & fail to conform to existing norms, and a failure has taken place.

The feeling of transitioning become possible and desirable when there is the presence of a supportive community. A supportive communities as a transsexual. This communities can be consider as new cultural that made to broaden those norms (transsexual).

This article discuss about transsexual in a more scientific lens.

 

GESTURE, EPHEMERA, AND QUEER FEELING: APPROACHING KEVIN AVIANCE by JOSE ESTEBAN MUNOZ
As mentioned by the writer, historically, queer evidence was used to penalise and discipline queer desires, connections and acts.
The key to queering evidence (prove and read queerness) is by the concept of ephemera.

Define Ephemera: things that not lasting, more than a day. (paper, ticket, catalogue…)
Ephemeral evidence is not really obvious because it needed to stand against the mainstream visibility and the potential tyranny (cruel rule/government) of the fact (often cast antinormative desire as the bad object).

The main element of showing the sphere of queer experience is GESTURE.

Dance floor – as a stage for queer performativity that is integral(fundamental) to everyday life. It is also a space where the relations between memory & content, self & other were intertwined. In the dance floor, they exchange the kinesthetic experience  through which we become less like Ourselves and more like Each other.

Writer was comparing Kevin Aviance (famous queer performer in nightclubs) and Charlier Chaplin and saying that both are master of queer gesture where their gesture speaks loud and clear.
Gestures transmit ephemeral knowledge of lost queer histories and possibilities within public culture.

Then, the writer gives an ephemeral evidence by providing a personal experience of a gay man. How he was being teased by his family and friends about his non-normative way of walking and gesture, and how he started to studied the different ways of walking and gesture of man and woman and try to learn the ‘correct’ way of movement as a boy.

‘We cannot simply conserve a person or a performance through documentation, we can perhaps summon up through memory, the acts and gestures  that meant so much to us. ‘ this sentence was used to explain about the poem in this article. To me, it somehow like explaining ephemeral evidence.

Queerness itself as being filled with the intention to be lost, lost in the space or lost in relation to the space of heteronormativity . To accept loss is to accept queerness, loss of heteronormativity authorisation and entitlement.

The writer describe the way Kevin Aviance was performing, the way he dressed, and the way he danced. He is an amplified and extreme queer body, a body in motion that rapidly deploys the signs, the gestures of queer communication, survival, and self-making. Said the writer.

Further more, his performance is an unique cohabitation of tractional female and male traits, which he does not wear wig and audience still able to identified his genital with the shape. To perform such a hybrid gender is not only to be queer but to defy troubling gender logics within gay spaces.

Queer theory has made explicitly clear: the set of behaviours and codes of conduct that we refer to as feminine or masculine are not slaves to the biological.
The writer conclude the article with saying that however the performance ends but the gesture and the ephemeral trace becomes the queer history and futurity. The gesture expires, its materiality has transformed into ephemera that are utterly necessary.

 

LECTURE 7 BOREDOM

BEING BORING by KENNETH GOLDSMITH

‘I allowed myself no creative liberties with the text.’ an inspiring statement for me to think about creating artwork.

I was thinking that almost all artist trying so hard to be creative while creating art, what happen if we not allow to use our creativity at all while making an art? It’s that possible? Can that be a way of create failure work?

John Cage suggested that if something is boring after 2 minutes, try it for 4, then 8, then an hour, then 2 hours. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. There is certain kind of unbarring boredom that is fascinating and transcendent.                     It sounds like failure performance, where we look for the good stuff from a trashy performance.

Another kind of boring is called boring boring by the writer. It is like being somewhere we don’t want to be/ doing something we don’t want to do.
Unboring boring is a voluntary state, like we volunteer to watch a butoh show for example.

Writer gives an example of typing word. When someone is volunteer to type and someone is being forced to type, there is a distinction. There is a difference between voluntary and involuntary boredom.

It makes me think of Martin O’Brien endurance class. Where he forced us to do the exercise for a long period of time and which we are not really willing to do, it was an involuntary boredom somehow.

BOREDOM: Siegfried Kracauer

Kracauer wrote a book call Boredom in 1924, anticipated modern everyday life as a culture of distraction. Where so many exciting and interesting things surround us. This environment of modernity is made up of commodified forms of communication (adverts, films, radio..) which aggressively impress.introduce the audience.

Boredom outcome is by its critical refusal.

The failure of bored in such a culture marks the success of distraction.

They come out with this statement: to declare yourself bored is not a mark of failure but the necessary precondition the possibility of generating authentically new (completely new rather than the old dressed up as the new).

LECTURE 8 PARTICIPATION

The Genealogy of Participatory Art

Participatory practice is one of the main characteristics of contemporary art.

In this article, it questioned about how modern art functions, the radical separation of artists and their public.

In the early Romantic era, poets and artists were complaint about the separation of art from its audience (this separation was a result of the secularisation of art, paternalism and censorship), the normative idea is: the artist produce art, the public views and evaluates it.  Artist=active, audience=passive.

Writer has made a comparison between art with science and technology. If an artwork did not favour the public, it somehow devoid its value. It has no merit other than the recognition from the public. Unlike science and technology, it has no compelling function independent of its audience, it is about fact somehow.

Richard Wagner has mentioned that the typical artist in his time is an egoist who is completely isolated from the life of the people and practices his art. He suggested that the artwork of the future must realise the need for ‘the passing over of Egoism into Communism’, therefore artist should abandon their social isolation.

‘The death of the author’. It is impossible to differentiate participatory and non participatory art, because this can occur through the surrender of authorship by the artist. The enactment of the self-abduction grants the author the possibility of controlling the audience, whereby viewer forfeits his secure external position, viewer not just participant but also an integral part of the artwork. Therefore, participatory art can be understood not only as reduction, but also as an extension of authorial power.

Futurists and Zurich Dadaists were pursued the dissolution of artistic individuality and authority of their practices. They were more direct when it came to activating their audience, such as scandalising or attacking the audience members physically.

LECTURE 3 & 4 ABJECTION

Abject: experienced or present to the maximum degree of something bad/completely without pride or dignity of a person or behaviour. hina

Abjection: the act of humiliating or degrading. kehinaan

 

POWER OF HORROR by Julia Kristeva

According to Kristeva, the abject refers to the human reaction (vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. The primary example for what causes such a reaction is the corpse (which traumatically reminds us of our own materiality); however, other items can elicit the same reaction: the open wound, shit, sewage, even the skin that forms on the surface of warm milk.

Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary form of abjection.

The abject marks what Kristeva terms a “primal repression,” one that precedes the establishment of the subject’s relation to its objects of desire and of representation, before even the establishment of the opposition, conscious/unconscious. Kristeva refers, instead, to the moment in our psychosexual development when we established a border or separation between human and animal, between culture and that which preceded it.

On the level of archaic memory, Kristeva refers to the primitive effort to separate ourselves from the animal: “by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder”. On the level of our individual psychosexual development, the abject marks the moment when we separated ourselves from the mother, when we began to recognize a boundary between “me” and other, between “me” and “(m)other.”  The abject is also “a precondition of narcissism” , which is to say, a precondition for the narcissism of the mirror stage, which occur after we establish these primal distinctions. The abject thus at once represents the threat that meaning is breaking down and constitutes our reaction to such a breakdown: a reestablishment of our “primal repression.” The abject has to do with “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules”  and, so, can also include crimes like Auschwitz. Such crimes are abject precisely because they draw attention to the “fragility of the law”.

In phobia, Kristeva reads the trace of a pre-linguistic confrontation with the abject, a moment that precedes the recognition of any actual object of fear: “The phobic object shows up at the place of non-objectal states of drive and assumes all the mishaps of drive as disappointed desires or as desires diverted from their objects”.The object of fear is, in other words, a substitute formation for the subject’s abject relation to drive. The fear of, say, heights really stands in the place of a much more primal fear: the fear caused by the breakdown of any distinction between subject and object, of any distinction between ourselves and the world of dead material objects.

The abject for Kristeva is,  closely tied both to religion and to art, which she sees as two ways of purifying the abject: “The various means of purifying the abject—the various catharsis (a release of emotional tension)—make up the history of religions, and end up with that catharsis up to the standard of  excellence called art, both on the far and near side of religion.

 

Question: Is it Martin’s work that he hits his chest and force the mucus vomit out from his mouth consider abject art?

 

THE RETURN OF THE REAL by HAL FOSTER

The Artifice of Abjection

Abjection is a condition in which subject hood is troubled.

To abject – is to expel, to separate

To be abject – is to be repulsive, stuck, subject enough to feel this subjecthood at risk.

AN INTIMATE DISTANCE: WOMEN, ARTISTS & THE BODY by Rosemary Betterton

Fear and loathing of the female body has a long and well founded tradition within European culture, the true nature of women has provoked desire and disgust. ‘To be a woman in her natural state is to invite disgust.’

Femininity and the consumption of food are closely connected, in women, fatness is taken to signify both loss of control and a failure of feminine identity. ‘Woman-shame-fat’.

Betterton has given an example: When I looked at the shape of my body I was ashamed of being a women, I wondered what men really thought about women – I was humiliated being a woman and annoyed to feel anyone looking at me. Somehow this shows that fat has abject the woman? The power of gaze is from the man.

After the writer gives a short description of a film, she comes out with a statement: ‘Fat women are mad and murderous.’ I personally see the hidden message behind this statement. Fat women is scary, psycho, non-normative. It somehow warn the women not to become fat, other wise they will fall into this category of failure. This is completely a social constructively towards woman’s body.

Female body becomes the focus of cultural anxiety and disgust, in art works made by women that deal with the body’s margins and its erotic pleasure, exploring the fascinations and fears of our own changing, consuming and desiring corporeal being.

. . . . .

Feminism, Femininity and Transgression in Art

Abject art described as work that suggests abject materials such as dirt, hair, excrement, dead animals, menstrual blood and rotting food in order to confront taboo issues of gender and sexuality. Abject work consider inappropriate by conservative, dominant culture.

There is a range of practices by women artists using the ‘forbidden’ materials and images in art to explore sexual themes, somehow created a transgressive femininity in the art.

Some examples are Judi Chicago’s Red Flag and Carolee Schneeman’s Interior Scroll. Revealing hidden aspects of women’s bodies such as menstruation (often conceived as unclean), and their aim was to challenge the silencing of women’s sexuality within culture.

1970s, female body could be represented unfolding petals of a flower (I think it means to search the internal part of women’s body, yet it might be not so violence).

1990s, artists works are more likely about the fear and fascination of women’s bodies. Since the increased number of AIDS, the sexual body has displayed both disease and desire, breaking boundaries to invoke the disturbing fantasy of body-in-pieces. Contains violent imagery that brings out strong emotional and physical responses. But then the artist realise shocking the work may be less significant than the exploration of the body as a problematic site which disrupts normative assumptions of gendered difference, so replaced by attempts to represent experiences of the feminine body that are physically and culturally determined.

. . . . .

The Mouth is Interesting Because It Is One Of Those Places Where The Dry Outside Moves Toward The Slippery Inside

The focus on food as a primary source of abjection. Food enters the body from outside, crossing the dividing boundary between the self and that which is external to it.

The powerful taboos on ‘unclean’ food. The writer gives an example: a single hair from the head appears as a shining line of gold in the light, but the same hair swallowed in a mouthful of food makes us gag with disgust. This is because we feel the hair is unclean, bodily waste and we not suppose to eat hair. Yet, not all bodily margins and wastes are equally dangerous and not interpreted in the same way, because each society construstc its own systems of marginality. ‘Each culture has its own specific risks and problems.’

Symbology: taking some image of food and find its symbol that relates to sex.

 photographs by Hannah Collins.

In my cultural, some young people will refer oyster as varginal because there are some similarities in them, the wetness, maybe the color and the image. In these two pictures, I somehow able to relate them with varginal too especially the second photograph, the hair and the disgusting reddish in the middle makes me imagine of varginal.

‘I think human most desire things are food and sex which are one of the basic needs of being. Therefore, it might be easier to relate both desires together.’

 

 

Kiki Smith’s blood pool – provoke juxtaposing reflection of disgust and desire with showing the naked body which can be erotic (desire) but the whole body is like burned and cover with blood (disgust).

 

The writer explain Kristeva’s abject theory:

One of the abjection is the process of separating our infant selves from our parents.

Abjection is the psychic expression of fears associated with that archaic(no longer in everyday use) dependence and the loss involved in becoming an independent subject. Kristeva thinks that food is the ABJECT that sets up archaic relationships between human being and its other.

Nicoletta Comand’s installation of The Food I Ate Turned into Flesh, shows the fascination and fear of food, about eating disorder. Try to relate food and femininity, which I don’t really understand.

Food offers a way of exploring the pleausre and dangers of the body’s limits which are particularly relevant to women, because food is culturally gendered as feminine and because it provides means of discovering the contradictory and often unresolved feelings relating to feminine identity and maternal loss.

 

LECTURE 5 Pornography & Eroticism

IntroductionTo Eroticism by Bataile

In this article, the writer define eroticism as the goal of reproduction and the desire for children. Reproducing implies the existence of discontinuous beings, beings which reproduce themselves are different from one another, and the reproduced one are different from each other, just like they are different from their parents. All of them were different. He is born alone, he dies alone. There is a discontinuity between one and another.

The writer explain more deeper, the gulf exist just like between you listening to me and me speaking to you. We are attempting to communicate but no communication can abolish our fundamental difference. If you die, it is not my death, therefore we are discontinuous beings.

Writer intention to suggest that, ‘death means continuity of being. HOW? Reproduction leads to the discontinuity of beings, but brings into play their continuity; it is intimately linked with death. Death is to be identified with continuity, and both of these concepts are fascinating, This fascination is the dominant element in eroticism.’

I need further explanation about this suggestion.

We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation but we yearn for our lost continuity.

There are 3 type of eroticism: Physical, Emotional, Religious. To replace for individual isolated discontinuity a feeling of continuity.

Religious eroticism – something like seeking after God’s love.

The domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation. As the writer mentioned, the most violence thing is death which makes us obsess with the lastingness of our discontinuous being. The violence can be our own imagination.

The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators from their normal lives. Where both female and male attaining the same degree of Dissolution, the female (passive) is the one that is dissolved as a separate entity/body, while the male is the dissolution of the passive partner.

Nakedness offers a contrast to self-possession(control). It is a state of communication revealing a quest for a possible continuance of being beyond the confines(keep the limit) of the self. Bodies open out to a state of continuity that gives us a feeling of obscenity (kelucahan) which upset the physical state of self-control of the stable & recognise individuality.

According to the writer, stripping naked is the act  full significance of the act of killing, that eroticism was linked to the act of love with sacrifice, which writer think this as religious eroticism. But the female partner in eroticism  was seen as the victim, male as sacrificer.

 

Eroticism & Art by Mahon

The origin of the word erotic was from Greek which defined as sexual desire or passionate love, the life drive itself. The Greek notion has a range of expression for eros/erotic, from thoughts of desire and their representations in art and literature, to the sexual act itself.

The pleasures and desire of the flesh are only distraction, and sexuality as obstacle to spirit. by Plato in Symposium

David Hume: ‘Sexual love makes of the loved person an OBJECT of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside like a lemon which has been sucked dry.. Taken by itself it is a Degradation of human nature…that is why we are ashamed of sexual desire.’

Sexuality, sexual desire and the body are proposed as a THREAT to rational and civilized society. Eroticism is like to emotions has the power to bother the mind, the soul and to disrupt order. This struggle (between Eros & knowledge, emotions & reason, the flesh 7 the spirit, sexual expression & repression) is at the heart of erotic art. When erotic is being apply in art, there is the battle between body and the mind: it also speaks to our desire for a communion with other, our passion of life, our fear of mortality.

Human sexuality is unlike animal, it is restrict by social custom by TABOOS which certain acts are forbidden. The essence of eroticism lies in the transgression of these taboos. ‘eroticism presupposes man in conflict with himself.’ ‘man’s erotic urges terrify him.’

Erotic Art is all about jouissance(a pleasure but also as sexual climax and the bliss of enjoyment without fear of the costs), shifting from visual pleasure to the pursuit of pleasure without concerns about rules, ends, or closure. Artist used erotic to address the classicla ideal, beauty of our basic sexual desires for a greater moral good. But in the 19 & 20th centuries, artists increasingly used erotic for the danger it could pose to art and society rather than show the beauty of it. The danger which has the power to threaten the orderly balance like what Plato and Kant have recognised.

The big different between erotic and pornographic lies in the intent. Pornography main intent is to stimulate sexuality (sex or masturbation), it also invloves financial power for example pornography film 7 magazines exist for the purpose of making money. The writer stated that pornography draws on individual’s desire and fantasies, often deriving from childhood memories and fantasies, that long repressed by social conditioning – individual’s fantasy relationship with other is key to pornography’s fundamental relationship with power, but not with sex or Eros.

Consent: permission to do something/agreement to allow something to happen.

Consent is the key distinction between the erotic and the pornographic: consent allows sexual diversity(preference for heterosexual, gay, lesbian,S/M) in eroticism. It also ensures sexual ethics: pornographic description, staging, enactment of rape…in which there is graphic connection between sex and violence, pain, humiliation. There is an imbalance power between the members.

Erotic Art is different. It is about equality between members of opposite/same sexes. Erotic art challenges and produces power, exploring the nature and role of eroticismin in society of sexual desire and art itself. Eroticism as a means of pushing back the boundaries of art practice and aesthetic norms, which means to challenge socially accepted codes of sexual behaviour.

SEX IN ART: Pornography and Pleasure In The History of Art

The debates between art & pornography, pornography & censorship are very subjective business.

Taste, choice, categorisation and classification defines the viewer, the reader, the consumer. Censorship defines a culture and it’s limits. Like sensitive novelists seldom writes about sex scenes because they know that what they write defines themselves, Censorship is largely political, the purpose of censorship has been political: suppression.

Writer gives an example of men do not want to see mothers breast-feeding in public, because they think it is embarrassing.

‘Pornography is an emotive subject.’

For pornography to work, it needs a reader, a viewer, a consumer. Pornography subjectivity and objectivity are merging together because it is both the object and the subject of desire, the representation and the reader/consumer are impossible to separate., it is a package.

Virtual reality sex, sex without touching with our making contact with anything but the demand on computer, internet, video that generated retinal image.

Pornography is about male power, the degradation of the female is the means of achieving this power. Like Andrea Dworkin uses pornography as a way of showing how men control so many aspects of life, and how men express their hatred of women.

In pornography, the signifier is the phallus, while the site of pleasure is the woman’s body. It is both a pleasure machine and a fantasy.

Even the lesbians pornography is still works within patriarchy, within male-made structure. Lesbianism is not truly outside of heterosexuality and patriarchy because they were merely imitating  the patriarchal structures.

Female nude is the apotheosis of ‘high art’, yet it is in the borderline between art and pornography. Female nudes of high art type have been made for clients. Same to pornography. The high art nude is a site of political and economic manipulation, an expression of the power relations between patron and painter. The boundaries between art and pornography are being constantly blurred, reset, rewritten.

 

LECTURE 1 : THE TRANSGRESSIVE BODY

Transgression – an act that goes against the law, rules, or code; an offence.

 

 

 

The ‘Freak’ Body: Nature versus Culture?

The writer talked about how human is obsessed with body in nowadays life, this has been proven by watching tv programmes, magazines, fitness center and etc. Often tell us how the body should look.

However, popular culture has started a new entertainment known as the ‘freak show’. Freak show style interest in the non-normative body.

Transgressive body somehow refers to freak show is an attempt to representing the non-normative body in contemporary popular culture. Transgression body look at how this non-normative body is created and try to exploite it.

The writer then discussed about representation.

Representation is always re-presentation where it is never innocent because it is always construct according to a specific set of politics and ideas. The representation of the non-normative body in the media exist only as represenatation. This means that for example the body builder only appears in vascularity during a competition period, and it is rare. We immediately can imagine the image when someone says body builder, this is because we have seen such images in re-presentations.

Freak is always a cultural construct, it is a way of thinking. I personally think that, this case is similar to gender constructivity. The norms have influence the way of thinking in human, telling us what or how should we look and act.

There were 2 main modes of representing the ‘freaks’ has been introduced by Bogdan.

1. Exotic mode: focusing on its sexual potentials

2. Aggrandised mode: emphasize its social acceptability, how this body should be assimilated and tolerated.

Why we are still interested in looking at freaks?

This is because of freak shows bring to life our darkest and secret fears. This able to establishe ‘them and us’ boundary.

The writer then related the research with Michel Foucault theory.

Michel Foucault: how the body is governed by culture which controls what is appropriate and what is not, the body is in a politic field, power invest it, mark it, train it, touture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies and to produce signs. Culture has shaped our ideal about our body, how the body should do its appropriate gender. However, these ideals change according to culture and context. Fat used to mean healthy and considered as beauty, but nowadays, fat equals to ugly and unhealthy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 A PREFACE TO TRANSGRESSION by Michel Foucault

Sexuality is nature, it has been hiding and conceal its existence in some ways. For example, teacher tries to avoid the young student to talk about sex, some parents never discuss sex topic with their childrens. I personally thinks that sexuality in action is more clear and often compare to language form.

After our positive awareness (or maybe open minded) allows us to convert it into normal language, finally it emerge in the clear light of language.

Question: is sexuality one of the facts that leads to transgression?

Sexuality surrounds us in our individuality & isolation, and marks the limit within us and make us as a limit.

Question: Why so?

Profanation no longer recognises any positive meaning in the sacred. The writer question is profanation equal to Transgression?

Sade: the language of sexuality has lifted us into the night (possess the violence of light) where God is absent, where transgression actions are allow without the existence of God. Profanation that identifies the absent of God.

The Death of God  somehow means break the limitation from his existence; to kill God in order to lose language. The death of God somehow allow the world to expose the experince of its limits, and trangresses the limits.

Transgression is an action which involves the limit. The limit and transgression depend on each other, a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable, transgression would be pointless if it just only crossed a limit that composed of illusions. Transgression carries the limit right to the limit of its being, and to find itself in what it excludes, in order to be more exact and recognize itself.

Transgression might create new normalisation when it keep crossing the boundaries, slowly it can create a new borders. The more transgression the more laws might appear.

Contestation an affirmation that affirms nothing, a radical break of transitivity.

The twentieth centuy has discovered the limit and transgression which consumemate us, where consumption was based on need, and need based on the model of hunger, all together has discover sexuality, discover the universal nature of transgression.

Language has absorbed our sexuality and take away the nature of it, and place sexuality in a void (not valid), where it constantly sets up as the law/limits it trangresses.

An interesting quote ‘Sexuality has never stopped speaking.’ what I understand is that sexuality constantly speaks not verbally but other ways.

Find the possibilities outside our normal, norms.

 

 

LECTURE 2: BARE-NUDE-NAKED-CLOTHESS
The Naked and The Nude by Kenneth Clark

Naked: to be deprived of our clothes, somehow feels/implies some embarrassment. Not produce desire, is like the Real that we are fear off because it expose us and we loss our identity and become common thing. It it somehow other but it is an unfamiliar common thing.

Maybe you can say something about your self and consider as nakedness/nudity because it somehow expose yourself.

Nude: in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. idealic body, contracts of how body should be look like. About Seduction and perpetuate beauty. Show something but hide a lot of thing, means that there is exposure but there are more hidden part such as his identity, his subjectivity. There is conceal.

why we are covering our body? but we ownself don’t really understand our property. Think about this question.

1. because it is my property and a capitalism, you are not allow to have it.

2.

what for of being naked, nude and bare in ourself in our artwork?

Naked human body was the major subject in Art.

you can say naked and nude as the other. We found it difficult to accept because we are unfamiliar with it.

Nude is an Art Form invented by the Greeks in the 5th century B.C. Greeks attached great importance to their nakedness. The feeling, that the spirit and body are one, which is the most familiar of all Greek characteristics. Greek statues, the abstract shape, the square and the circle seem like male and female.

Often in Nude Art, it is more strict compare to photographs of the nature (animal, tree). Photographs understand that nude photograph the real object is not to reproduce the naked body, but to imitate or achieve artist’s view of what naked body should look like.

Somehow, Nude Art arouses our memories of the things we wish to do with ourselves – perpetuate ourselves.

Some says, if nude art brings out spectator’s ideas or desire that appropriate to the material subject, it is bad/false art. But some says the opposite.

‘Nude is misture of memory & sensation.’

Nude and Naked actually depend on the viewer how to receive it but not so much about the one who nude and naked.

 

 

 

 

Nudity & Textuality in Postmodern Performance by Karl Toepfer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Skin, Body, and Presence in Contemporary European Choreography by Andre Lepecki

Nowadays, naked bodies are ever more present on European stages. Many choreographer often used bare bodies in their work, including Jerome Bel, Vera Mantero and La Ribot.

However different artists have used naked body, but the body politics/the meanings lie beneath the body were different. This is because of they are from various national origins and different political concerns; they are created by artists from different cultures and countries, plus different choreographic styles.

Somehow, these artists works have denies theatrics and bring their work closer to performance art. – ‘the explicit body’ on stage.

This article described few choreographies that related to this topic and analysed them. First choreography she mentioned was Jerome Bel’s work, which reduced the theatricals, a typical contemporary European dance. Not like what we often imagine performance in theatre, which grand light design, grand stage and costume, etc. His choreography has no lighting design, no sound system, no costumes, no set.

‘Beauty is the way in which truth exits as the overt and explicit.’ Heidegger.

With few analysis of European contemporary dance, writer came out with her conclusion: the contemporary explicit body on the European dance stage reveals the power of the surface, skin of our time: open, marked, rented. These choreographers operate in the mode of exposure of THE BARE BODY and expose a body that IMPRINTED by HISTORY and the process of history’s DECONSTRUCTION of the body. Skin/body’s surface as a site of tension and historical inscription.