Duchamp within and against Lacan

Critical reception of Marcel Duchamp since the 1970s has tended to elevate him into the very figure of the Artist he sought to attack. One aspect of this domestication has involved neglecting Duchamp’s fin de siècle ‘eroticism’ with its sexual innuendos and double-entendres. Yet this very readymade vulgarity allows us to recover a Duchamp still capable of disrupting the genres of Art and the gendered Artist, by revealing a theory embedded in his work which continually reverses and displaces phallocentrism in a game consisting of the confusion of genders and genres. We argue that Duchamp’s disruption of the discursive typologies of the genre of art can be profitably read through this apparently trivial sexualized wordplay, particularly in the transgender passage into Rrose Sélavy. Reading this aspect of Duchamp after, i.e. within and against, Lacan demonstrates how Duchamp’s singular regime of signs governed by equivocity and indetermination subverts the ‘phallic function’ of the signifier

Isotropic Surface Remeshing

International audienceThis paper proposes a new method for isotropic remeshing of tri- angulated surface meshes. Given a triangulated surface mesh to be resampled and a user-specified density function defined over it, we first distribute the desired number of samples by generalizing error diffusion, commonly used in image halftoning, to work directly on mesh triangles and feature edges. We then use the resulting sam- pling as an initial configuration for building a weighted centroidal Voronoi tessellation in a conformal parameter space, where the specified density function is used for weighting. We finally create the mesh by lifting the corresponding constrained Delaunay trian- gulation from parameter space. A precise control over the sampling is obtained through a flexible design of the density function, the latter being possibly low-pass filtered to obtain a smoother grada- tion. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach through vari- ous remeshing examples

‘It doesn’t reveal itself’: erosion and collapse of the image in contemporary visual practice

The article explores the extent to which ‘pictorial art’ resists legibility, transparency and coherence. The analysis of three artistic case studies, Idris Khan, Maria Chevska and Jane and Louise Wilson, serves to investigate established hierarchies in our perception of visual referents. In the discussion, the article inquires the means of erosion, veiling and dissemblance as ways to critique assumption of the homogeneity of the image. All artists cast a view of the external world by diverting it, defacing it and distancing themselves from the external environment. However, the distancing is never disconnected from the everyday and never succumbs to abstraction. The article argues that the crisis of the image offers a productive framework that allows artists to draw attention to the absence of logical structure and the instability of the visual sign

Hétérogenèse de l’inconscient, ou les Cartographies bien tempérées

The heterogenesis of the unconscious or the well tempered Cartographies. Eric Alliez presents a reading of Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Félix Guattari’s latest book. He distinguishes first of all three series of intervention : territorialized power, the capital of knowledge and self-reference ; hence the urgency of a speculative cartography of the enunciation of statements going in the direction of the process of self-reference. Then, he points out that psychoanalyses and capitalism have the same structural rythm. At the intersection of the lines of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, the collective equipment of subjectivation to remold the enunciation to the detriment of its contents. Hence the importance of the way the enunciations are constructed in interaction with radically heterogenous fields. Finally, Alliez approaches the ontological aspects. If Analyses is a privileged component of passage between Politics and Ontology, then the politics of self-referential constructions, on a « process » energy which makes essentially dynamic relations drift far away from their position of entropic balance, constitutes itself into a real politics of being.Eric Alliez présente une lecture de Cartographies schizoanalytiques, le dernier livre de Félix Guattari. Il distingue d’abord trois séries d’intervention : pouvoir territorialisé, capital de savoir et auto-référence ; d’où l’urgence d’une cartographie spéculative des agencements d’énonciation pour aller dans le sens de la voie d’auto-référence processuelle. Puis il relève que psychanalyse et capitalisme ont le même rythme structural. A l’intersection des lignes de deterritorialisation et de reterritorialisation, les équipements collectifs de subjectivation tentent de remodeler l’énonciation au détriment des énoncés. De là l’importance des agencements d’énonciation en interaction avec des domaines radicalement hétérogènes. Enfin, Alliez aborde les aspects ontologiques. Si l’Analyse est composante de passage privilégiée entre Politique et Ontologie, alors la politique des agencements auto-référenciés sur une énergie processuelle faisant dériver loin de leur position d’équilibre entropique des rapports essentiellement dynamiques se constitue en véritable politique de l’être.Alliez Éric. Hétérogenèse de l’inconscient, ou les Cartographies bien tempérées. In: Chimères. Revue des schizoanalyses, N°10, hiver 1990. pp. 121-130

Pour une phénoménologie des images virtuelles

Alliez Éric. Pour une phénoménologie des images virtuelles. In: Chimères. Revue des schizoanalyses, N°27, hiver 1996. Le Temps de la rue. pp. 123-133

Gordon Matta-Clark: “en algún lugar fuera de la ley”

“Nadie podía construir edificios cómo Gordon los destruía”, leemos en la edición de Flash Art, publicada poco después de la muerte del artista. En este artículo, se parte de la violencia tanto física como social de las intervenciones de Gordon Matta-Clark (su “brutalidad de líneas puras”), con el fin de introducir la relación (y la negación en dicha relación) entre Matta-Clark y los arquitectos a quienes él coloca “en los extremos opuestos del polo” a su propia operación anarquitectónica. Sin embargo, lo que Matta-Clark propone no es tanto un uso alternativo del recinto del espacio, sino el diagrama de una nueva enunciación espacial que, como se intenta mostrar aquí, ofrece una perspectiva nueva de los mismos términos en los que se planteó la pregunta del arte al final de la década de 1960

Gordon Matta-Clark: “en algún lugar fuera de la ley”

“Nadie podía construir edificios cómo Gordon los destruía”, leemos en la edición de Flash Art, publicada poco después de la muerte del artista. En este artículo, se parte de la violencia tanto física como social de las intervenciones de Gordon Matta-Clark (su “brutalidad de líneas puras”), con el fin de introducir la relación (y la negación en dicha relación) entre Matta-Clark y los arquitectos a quienes él coloca “en los extremos opuestos del polo” a su propia operación anarquitectónica. Sin embargo, lo que Matta-Clark propone no es tanto un uso alternativo del recinto del espacio, sino el diagrama de una nueva enunciación espacial que, como se intenta mostrar aquí, ofrece una perspectiva nueva de los mismos términos en los que se planteó la pregunta del arte al final de la década de 1960