Adorno

Adorno - Llewellyn Millhouse 

My interest in the writing of Theodor Adorno stems from the critical analysis of contemporary cultural and economics that is central to my art practice. In his writings on sociology and popular culture, and its intersection with his theory of domination within human psychology, Adorno identifies culture and media in advanced industrialised capitalism as the chief force of pacification and manipulation of the individual. Adorno recognizes popular culture as a socially constructed entertainment industry, as formulaic, mechanical, alienating and dominating as its reflective industry of production. According to Adorno, the individual in an advanced capitalism of abundance is simultaneously dominated through both modern systems of production within the workplace, and consumption of culture, leisure and notions of wealth in the entertainment industry. As opposed to the economic determinism and romanticised ruminations and projections of revolution that define Orthodox Marxism, Adorno and the Frankfurt school of Marxism were principally concerned with consciousness, psychology and culture. Reflecting on the absorption of capitalist values within consciousness and their subsequent supremacy over human life, Adorno’s critical theory provides an approach to contemporary culture, philosophy, economics, and sociology that is not limited and deformed by political pragmatism and political systems. 

My art practice is primarily a response to the critical theory of Adorno, and his successor Guy Debord’s theories of culture and class struggle. Within my practice I attempt to illustrate the physical and metaphysical body that is denied within popular culture, creating images of the body and the human that discredit, attack or subvert the commoditised images of pseudo-culture generated by the entertainment industry. Through the channelling of labour towards the creation of media, integrating a primal liberty to interconnect manual and mental labour in a creative process, my painting practice endeavours to illustrate the physicality of alienation, commodification, and exchange value obsession through the embodiment of their effects by the tangible human body.

A Brief Introduction to John Coplans - Dana Lawrie

Born in London in 1920, John Coplans grew up in South Africa. He spent the better half of his twenties in service, soldiering in Somalia, Burma, and Ethiopia, before returning to Europe and finally settling in America in the 1960’s. He was an advocate for pop art and was himself an abstract expressionist painter, critic, curator, as well as an editor of Art Forum until the late seventies. 

Photography was an approach to art-making that was borne of John’s sixties and saw him gain recognition in the art world as a great talent. John Coplans’ autobiographical photographs approach the human condition in a manner that is relative to every viewer. Although the act of photography may be, in this case, intrinsically linked to personal trauma, the greater human populous is affected by the themes he brings forward; those of ageing, detachment, isolation, and selfhood.  Deliberately avoiding depicting his own face in the portraits, Coplans’ work is allowed a function beyond the genre of self-portraiture – one that is deeply embedded in the worth of art as an expressive or healing act.  Through his photographs, Coplans confronts personal sufferings, gaining understanding of selfhood and, in doing so, alters the means by which the viewer of his artwork understands themselves. In this way, each viewer of Coplans’ work is as a voyeur to his personal trauma, and therefore, the viewer confronts their own trauma by proxy.

I intend to discuss the work of John Coplans in greater detail in both my proposed seminar presentation and further essay. in which I will discuss his critical written work and photographs with reference to ideas on the function of self-representation, healing, and identity in art. Examples of my own painting will also be discussed and situated within the framework of relevant topics; namely those of selfhood, detachment, and art as a psychological tool of understanding.

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Images:

Fig. 1. John Coplans, Self Portrait (Back and Hands) (1984), image, viewed 30^th August 2011,

                  Source: < http://www.artpublic.ch/artists/coplans/coplans3.php>

Links to EFEMERAL facebook page and 4ZZZ interview, for anyone who's interested...

http://www.facebook.com/briohny.walker/posts/10150357817774974#!/pages/-eFEMeral-/216691011685350

http://www.4zzzfm.org.au/podcasts/culture/efemeral-briony-lipton-nicola-scott

Ooooh yeah, Amelia Jones

Amelia Jones is well respected for her writing on the presence, use, and meaning of the body in modern and contemporary art. Her books and essays have combined feminist, phenomenological, poststructuralist and psychoanalytic frameworks, rigorously arguing that “the majority of supposedly ‘anti-‘ or ‘post-‘ modernist analyses continue to veil the investments at work in posing particular values and meanings for works of art” (Jones and Stephenson 1999, p. 4).

In suggesting that the social, sexual and political (as well as linguistic, theoretical, embodied) contexts in which art works are created and received need to be acknowledged and analysed, Jones states that both the processes of making and receiving or interpreting art are performative. That is, they are ongoing and interwoven processes that respond to and engage with each other and the aforementioned contexts, rather than separate acts with a final, determinable message or goal. The art work, Jones (1999, p. 1) is no longer a “static object” with a single, prescribed signification” that is communicated unproblematically from maker to universalised viewer.  Jones sees this notion of the ‘performative’ as being particularly evident in performance and body art. She is especially well known for her writing on the reemergance of the artist’s body in late 1960s – 1970s performance art, and contemporary art practice that creates or performs subjectivity and meaning with or through the body; the body as the means through which art is being produced and received. She has also written about artists using new technologies to articulate embodiment, subjectivity, and meaning in different ways, thereby challenging the organisation and study of culture.

Throughout her work there is an acknowledgement and interrogation of how subjectivity is formed and performed in acts of art making and interpreting that is integral to the understanding of performativity. As Jones (1999, p. 2) explains, adopting the notion of performativity as a critical strategy in the study of visual culture, “enables a recognition of interpretation as fragile, partial and precarious affair and, ultimately, affords a critique of art criticism and art history as they have been traditionally practiced”.  In this way her writing implicates the individuals and institutions that have a stake in art criticism/history, and calls for a “cautious and critical self-reflexivity” to become part of the process of art interpretation (Jones and Stephenson 1999, p. 3). Moreover, her writing demonstrates that the insights provided by art works that encourage a recognition of this performative dimension of meaning production, “enable a radical rereading of potentially any artistic practice” past or present, that enables a new way of thinking through visual culture and opening it out to new, uncertain and evolving critical perspectives (Jones and Stephenson 1999, p. 4).

Jones is particularly relevant to my practice as I am interested in producing art works and art criticism that explores the overlapping and intertwined processes in/by which meaning is produced. In my own arts practice I am particularly concerned with how language informs the creation of shifting subjectivities and meanings, as well as our understanding of bodies. I am also interested in how meaning is conveyed or creating through the presence, or the explicit absence, of the artist’s body. For example, the reconfiguration of the body into non-abject information by medical imaging technologies, the physicality or action communicated by brush strokes, or the trace of live events created through photography.

Jones, A and Stephenson, A (eds.) 1999, Performing the Body/Performing the Text, Routledge, New York.

Carl A. P. Ruck

And the relevance of his work to the artistic practice of Iason Yannakos

Carl A. P. Ruck is currently a professor in the Classical Studies department at Boston University. He received his B.A. at Yale University, his M.A at the University of Michigan, and a P.H.D. at Harvard University.

Working primarily within the fields of mythology and religion, Ruck is best known for his contribution to the discussion of the sacred role of entheogens in classical western culture and their influence, through history, on modern western religions. An entheogen, strictly speaking, is a psychoactive substance used in a religious, shamanistic or spiritual context. First coined in 1979 by Ruck and a group of ethno-botanists and scholars of mythology including the late R. Gordon Wasson and Richard Evans Schults, entheogen literally means “that which causes God to be within an individual”.

Ruck has written and co-written over twelve books, countless scholarly and mainstream articles and actively participates in many public and institutional lectures. He currently teaches a class in mythology at Boston University which expounds his theories regarding the role and influence of entheogens in the western tradition.

 Cover image from Apples of Appolo (Ruck, Staples, Heinrich) - The Luminous Cross

   (De Testamentis Christi), Boehme, Alchemical Drawing, Theosophia Revelata, 1730

The relevance of Carl A. P. Ruck to the artistic practice of myself, Iason Yannakos, and to this particular course of study (Contemporary Art Criticism) is manifold but can easily be reduced to three main categories. The first being the intimate nature of my artistic practise; the second, in bearing my artistic practise within a broader context; and finally, concerning the role of art as a common, symbolic and non linear form of communication and record.

Initially, my art practice almost exclusively centred on the documentation and metabolisation of visions and experiences relating to my use of entheogenic substances and the personal philosophies which emerged as a result. It was a time when I found art to be a most beneficial and healing practise. Due to the inherent quality of visual expression to allow a symbolic and intuitive navigation of the irrational, I found it an important tool in the exploration of liminal experience and psychological regression.

As time meandered by and the knowledge of my internal terrain became more acute, I became increasingly interested in the commonality of liminal experience; the various arenas within which it could be found, differing methods of attainment and the cultural and philosophical interpretations of the experience. In short, I craved context. I am of a mixed, broken but stoic and proud heritage with an unusually divers mixture of culture, creed and calling. And having naturally eclectic interests didn't help. I came to feel that everything was relevant. Interest in unification theories, holistic philosophies and comparative religion resulted and as tangent lead to tangent, enter Carl A. P. Ruck. Ruck's work was important as it followed the movement of people and their understanding of the liminal from the depths of antiquity, to influence and form what we now call western culture. It is within this ancient tradition, and its unexpectedly expansive root system, that I trace my heritage.

Using a blend of etymological associations, linguistic metaphors and mythological allegory coupled with representational and symbolic art as a yard stick, Ruck and others attempted to unravel the sacred foundations of western culture. The role of art as a symbolic and layered representation and record of complex and interrelated ideas is key to this particular area of study and to the study of art itself.

Iason Yannakos