<documenta X><blast> quavering
Bracha Lichtenberg - Ettinger (bracha@easynet.fr)
Sun, 3 Aug 1997 01:19:41 +0200
Jordan, you wrote on 1.8.
>The figure-matrice is invisible, and we can only interpolate from its
>traces, or what projects up from its depths, so to speak, into the field
>of the visible. And then there is a paradox, that something so
>'anti-form' could, as described by Lyotard, actually be a 'form,' though
>a 'bad form.'
Just briefly, this is not what Lyotard says, but a misunderstanding
derived, I am afraid, from Krauss' reading of Lyotard. Lyotard
differentiates three kinds of figures: a figure-image, a figure-forme and a
figure matrice. It is the figure-forme which has to do with the 'bad form',
not at all the figure-matrice. So if a paradox there is, it is not at that
point. Somewhere else he wrote on my work that the painting fights, works
in the sense of the woman's labor and anamnesic working-through in
psychoanlysis, to give a trace or make a sign inside the visible to a
visual gesture which transgresses the visible, and that this is a paradox
that should be explored.
I would love to lift up your glove Jordan and explain better what happens
on the surface of my artworks, but I am not able to. My workingart is not
conceptual in that way, the paintings are not the performance of ideas
articulated beforehand but, rather, an embodiment of something that leads
to ideas that becomes a part of the art project itself, and which I try to
express as precisely as I can. There is a spiral movement in that kind of
route, both shared and autistic. If working, as Lucio says, hands the eye
overbordering 'our' body, 'the beat is how a pigment clings to a memory
sway -- weighing a body to not worry about space' while opening it. I don't
know how to speak a better language that will allow a more communictive
dialogue about such space and such trace. Does a more communicative
dialogue necessarily a more productive one? maybe there is no connection
between communicability and reciprocal productive-ability in a project like
ours?
I don't even speak "Lacanian" I am afraid, but, to borrow Deleuze's
expression, some kind of a foreign language in a language, foreign no less,
and probably a 'losing language'. I'd love it to be so provoking and sexy
as that of CD's Jill and Mona or Angus' Vitruvius - but no chance; while
they were having fun I was hanging around in the wrong places and in the
wrong company... If my language quavers, trembles or is obscure, quavering
and obscure are then also the ideas it tries to express. Still when it is
to my taste precise, I then feel it attained simplicity. So I'll send -
separately - the 'home-affect and co/in-habit(u)ation' murmurs that deals
with 'co-spasming' and recurrences.
Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger