Crabface, Wounded Woman and Buttman: Refiguring moving, infecting temporalities

What happens when one time is inflected and infected with an ‘other’? What when the temporalities of pain, pleasure and desire intersperse and move closer, at the point of almost touching? Then we might come face to face with a temporality where (when?!) time is not linear and rational but connective and relational. Annalaura Alifuoco’s address longs to attend to such potential conjunctions (and contaminations) through the reading of cultural bodies whose temporal relations are vital, if precarious. In particular, Crabface, Wounded Woman and Buttman – Refiguring Moving, Infecting Temporalities tries to condense the atmosphere -- or temporality – surrounding and emerging from the queer, aging and sick body as it appears in Yvonne Rainer’s film MURDER and murder, and its syncopation and contact with the flesh of Xavier Le Roy’s moving body of Self Unfinished. The latter obsessed with the endgame of corporeal histories; the former situated after that endgame seems to be almost over, these narratives might be revealed as mutually engaged with discrepant but contiguous aspects of a larger ‘sense’ of time in which they share. Or, at the very least, the embodied temporality of their work can be felt aside one another, moving together backwards and into the future. These movements hold out the possibility of a temporal crabwalk, where events, appearances and ideas move fast alongside the practice of time as nowhere existing away from bodies and never alienable from their moving – and sometimes ‘touching’; infective – and at times ‘infected’ histories. This may be a model of temporality to be held with ‘care’

‘Alive’ Performance: Toward an Immersive Activist Philosophy

This article proposes to reanalyse the artistic and critical practice of performance through the deconstruction and remediation of its ‘virtual,’ unsighted potentials. It argues that the ontological distinction between material and immaterial representation can be dislodged by the proposition of an ontogenenic dimension of affective transmission and recreation. Such recursive system of forces and energies elicits change and transformation expanding the sensual and aesthetic practice of performance as alive art. These arguments connect concepts from aesthetic and political theory with philosophical ideas of virtual multiplicity, relationality, counter/intuition and (dis)individuation passing via the work of Brian Massumi and Teresa Brennan as well as other theorists. The approach intersects methodologies and epistemologies from activist philosophy, science and art with the radical contingencies implicit in performance as a ‘technology of aliveness’ (in)formed by tendencies of distribution of affective intensities and temporal (re)modulation of shared perception. Ultimately, these formulations propose to reimagine performance as a synaesthetic archive of perceptive experience marked by a representational impossibility; a failure to appear fully. This actual condition of recurrent abstraction enables however a processual state of becoming, becoming-other, and being-becoming in related mo(ve)ments of pure aliveness

The Tear that Tears the Ocean: Bas Jan Ader and the Search for the Miraculous

This paper takes conceptual artist, performance artist and filmmaker Bas Jan Arden’s film I’m Too Sad to Tell You (1971), a three-minute close-up of the artist heaving in the overflow of watery tears, as a starting point to reflect on the leakages and blockages intervening between the human (and humanism) and the elemental world. This affective form of minimalist rupture, metaphorically and physically, depicts an activity that exceeds the artist’s own body and ability to communicate. Moreover, the larger corpus of Ader’s small oeuvre, like his feelings here, spills over into a series of destabilising acts in which the subject attempts to extend the material limits of ‘man’ into (often liquid) environments. In the short film Fall 1, Los Angeles (1970), the artist sits on a chair straddled across the top of the roof of his home before falling and crashing into the garden. In Fall 2, Amsterdam (1970), the camera pans over a canal bridge, path and trees, before the artist rides into the frame, appears to lose control of his bicycle and plunges into the water. Referring to these famous ‘falling’ scenes Ader said: "I do not make body sculptures, body art, or body works. When I fell off the roof of my house or into a canal, it was because gravity made itself master over me." Being fully immersed in the activity or situation at hand – crying, falling, drowning, failing, gravity, water – the artist gives in, with calculated abandonment and absorption, into forces and elements that are not under human control. These acts both estheticise and rhythmicise the movements, ruptures, rumblings and passions that override the state of solipsistic immersion to acquire an ‘inhuman’ dimension of affectivity and interaction. But what happens to the subject in this complex field of forces and flows? According to Rosi Braidotti it becomes an expanded relational entity. In 1975, Arden disappeared into the Atlantic whilst trying to cross it with the smallest boat that ever tried to sail the Ocean. The gesture of putting oneself at the mercy of the sea ‘in search of the miraculous’ (this was the title the artist gave to his last known feat) painfully reverberates with more recent stories and histories of being at sea, at large, and literally overcome by the waters. In the language of Braidotti’s nomadic theory, these movements express both the crisis of the ‘majority’, who spill over, and the patterns of becoming of the ‘minorities’, who overflow. The challenge of this study is to discern between some of these different ebbs and flows. Hence, I want to read Ader's cool anti-subjective aesthetics alongside Braidotti’s passionate quest for a radically immanent philosophy of relations to explore experiences that would seem to overpower the subject, and the subjective, with the simultaneously tragic and miraculous condition of being in a liquid scape or state of immersion, in the incontrollable flow of things inhuman

Holding Out: The Sacred Space of Suspense and Sustainable Ethics

This chapter is concerned with the sacred sites of knowledge, which are regarded as the spaces that ‘hold out’ the capacity to engage with contingencies and uncertainties; that allow to think and create new situations with and through what is felt to be known, otherwise. To mark these possibilities, I consider the work of performance artist, activist and scholar Nigel Rolfe. Through radically uncertain acts and experiences, the artist situates human embodiment as something separate yet akin to its dwelling place within the world, from which all sacred traditions and resources of wisdom emerge. Knowledge here becomes the product of this special and spatial relation, which organises human and nonhuman relations. This is the space for a lay kind of sacredness that keeps things spiritually alive and ethically essential

Non-art and Other Non-philosophical Relations: An Essay on Fugitive Plasticity

Since the mid-1980s, Laruelle’s Non-philosophy has rejected the post-structuralist discourses and techniques for interpreting art in favour of constructing an aesthetics rooted in immanence and non-representationalism. In my understanding, the project of Non-philosophy reduces all concepts and practice of philosophy to pure variables; a fractal proliferation of models without origin or end. Testing the plasticity of this predicament, a provocative conception of Non-art should render art objects as pure material, mutating into forms of pluralism and hybridisation. By starting to sample this ‘matter’ from within Non-art discourses such as science and philosophy, I will investigate performance/art objects not in a reflective way but by concentrating on the immersive properties of art in relation to perception and affect. As a way to bring together insights on Non-art, I propose a philosophical elaboration of the concept of ‘plasticity’ as drawn from empirical science. So, in art works such as Lydia Clark’s Critters—geometrical combinations of objects and planes that need the contact of hands to become whatever they can become—we can find a post-deconstructive account of the formation, deformation, and reformation of material form. This experience can be mapped out as the scientific phenomenon of plasticity; the formation and development of the material networks and interconnections between sensible forms. What I pose to be Non-art can then be understood in relational terms, or as a purely relational ontology—there is plastic transformation because one expression or form of material existence in some way relates to another in the very plastic process of the transformation of art itself. Hence, I will be discussing Clark’s relational objects that become healing tools in an emphatical abandonment of art to create a dialogue between (Non-)art and (Non-)philosophy. The question then arises as to whether philosophical plasticity can make possible the intrication of material life and the transcendental in art, without becoming an aesthetic philosophy

The Performances of Sacred Places: Crossing, Breathing, Resisting

The Performances of Sacred Places: Crosggin, Breathing, Resisting offers a multi-layered and contemporary approach to the question of sacred sites, their practices, politics and ecologies. The overarching critical framework of inquiry is Performance Studies, a multidisciplinary methodological perspective that stresses the importance of investigating the practices and actions through which things are conducted and processes activated. This is an innovative perspective that recognizes the value, function and role that practices and their materialities have in the constitution of special places, their developments in culture, and the politics in place for the conservation of their sense of specialness. The questions investigated are: what is a sacred place? Is a place inherently sacred or does it become sacred? Is it a paradigm, a real location, an imaginary place, a projected condition, a charged setting, an enhanced perception? What kind of practices and processes allow the emergence of a sacred place in human perception? And what is its function in contemporary societies? The book is divided into three sections that evidence the three approaches that are generally engaged with and through which sacred places are defined, actualized and activated: Crossing, Breathing and Resisting. There is a strong field of international contributors including practitioners and academics working in the UK, USA, Poland and Australia