Ephemera Critica or plain truths about current literature

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Ephemera Critica: Or, Plain Truths about Current Literature

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Advanced search Search history. Browse titles authors subjects uniform titles series callnumbers dewey numbers starting from optional. See what's been added to the collection in the current 1 2 3 4 5 6 weeks months years. In dialogical practice production and reception co-occur, and reception itself is refashioned as a mode of production. As a result, the moment of reception is not hidden or unavailable to the artist, or the critic. Moreover, the experience of reception extends over time, through an exchange in which the responses of the collaborators result in subsequent transformations in the form of the work as initially presented.

Thus, we require new models of reception capable of addressing the actual, rather than the hypothetical, experience of participants in a given project, with a particular awareness of the parameters of agency and affect.

What is the relationship between language, utterance, physical gesture, and movement in these encounters? This would also necessitate an analysis of the gathering together and disaggregation of bodies within a given project, and the ways in which these varying proximities inflect the meaning of the work and the consciousness of the participants.

Textual or object-based practices are clearly finite; they exist for a fixed period of time the duration of an exhibition or commission, for example , and then end. Moreover, the spatial field for such practices is also, generally, fixed the space of the gallery, for example, or a series of discrete stations or sites organized through the commissioning process. Because the boundaries of the work are finite, and often predetermined by the particular limitations of a given exhibition space or venue, the critic can easily enough identify the object of analysis an installation, painting, or performance which begins and ends at clearly marked points in time.

Dialogical practices, on the other hand, can unfold over weeks, months, and even years, and their spatial contours or boundaries typically fluctuate, expand, and contract over time. As a result, this work confronts the critic with a very different set of questions.

When does the work begin and when does it end? What are the boundaries of the field within which it operates, and how were they determined? At the most basic level, can we even agree as to what constitutes the object of criticism? Because we are dealing with an unfolding process, rather than, or in addition to, a discrete image, object, or event defined by set limits of space the walls of a gallery or time the duration of a performance or commission , these questions become decisive in the analysis of the work.

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The unfinalizable quality of dialogical production requires us to understand the bounded-ness of the field of practice, and how these boundaries have been produced, modified, and challenged. This work also requires a very different understanding of duration in aesthetic experience. This model of reception assumes a viewer who is operating under the enforced thrall of an imposed ideological system, which can only be broken by a countervailing moment of homeopathic violence.

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As a result, there is no understanding of receptive time beyond the moment of disruption itself, no account of the sustainability of this transformed consciousness of the world. With dialogical art practices, temporality is both extensive and irregular, marked by a series of incremental subdivisions within the larger, unfolding rhythm of a given work.

I want to conclude by drawing together a set of three observations regarding the position of the critic relative to dialogical and collaborative art practices. The first concerns the status of theory. However, I do believe there has been a gradual drift away from closer engagement with the materiality of art practice as a result of the often-programmatic manner in which theory has been applied by many critics and historians. Too often critics use theory simply to provide intellectual validation for relatively unremarkable concepts or ideas that are already widely accepted within our discursive field, and which add little to our understanding of a particular project or work.

In this scenario theory can bring insight, but it can also be challenged in turn, perhaps by the very experience of practice itself. The second observation concerns the issue of reception. Insight is generated in many different ways in artistic practice, aside from the established schema of singular disruption and simultaneity. Finally, I want to note that dialogical practices suggest a very different understanding of the relationship between consciousness and action within the aesthetic. But all modernist art, even that which most violently rejects any demand for utility, is functional, whether as a protest against the very utilitarianism of modern society, or as a repository of specific quasi-spiritual values that are associated with an intellectual or creative resistance to capitalism.

The operative question is, how, and at what scale, this efficacy is enacted.

Author:John Churton Collins

In the conventional view, art can retain its cultural authority only so long as it operates through the incremental and privatized transformation of a single consciousness, in confrontation with a work of art. Once we attempt to extend this process to make it social, as it were , to understand the aesthetic as a form of knowledge that can be communicable within and among a larger collective, or in relationship to a set of institutions, rather than a single, sovereign consciousness, the autonomy of the aesthetic is endangered, and art is subsumed into its degraded kitsch-like variants.

This is why we so often see theorists imposing a firewall between the experience of the individual viewer and any subsequent practical and therefore non-aesthetic action, which might be informed by this encounter in some way. It seems to me that both of these constraints are being challenged by new forms of social art practice, in which we find a commitment to a broader, social articulation of aesthetic experience, and an interest in the creative, transversal relationship between consciousness and action in the world.

At the theoretical level we might say that these groups and artists are less concerned with locating the generative potential of aesthetic undecidabilty in the tension between the pure and the impure art vs. His publications include Art, Activism and Oppositionality: He's currently finishing work on Collective Situations: Click to start a discussion of the article above. University of Minnesota Press, , Duke University Press, It is perhaps not coincidental that this work has emerged at approximately the same time as an unprecedented expansion in the global market for contemporary art, and the monetization of contemporary art as a key site of capital investment for the upper class, especially among the newly rich of China, Russia, and Eastern Europe.

This economic infrastructure sustains an interlocking network of major collectors, biennials, galleries, critics, curators, magazines, and art consultants invested in the validation of contemporary art. For us, the argument regarding Socialist Realism is nonexistent. Art begins and ends with a recognition of its conventions.

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We will not contribute to that social critique which, swamped by its own disingenuousness, gives credence to such an object of repression as a mural about the war in Vietnam, painted by a white liberal resident in New York, a war fought for the most part by ghetto residents commanded by elements drawn from the southern lower-middle-class … Long working experience with major art journals has convinced us of the need to restore to the criticism of painting and sculpture, as to that of other arts, an intellectual autonomy seriously undermined by emphasis on extensive reviewing and lavish illustration.

October wishes to address those readers who, like many writers and artists, feel that the present format of the major art reviews is producing a form of pictorial journalism which deflects and compromises critical effort. This gesture, of course, assigns a decisive authority to the critic or historian who is in a position to define precisely what those norms might be, and to differentiate properly productive artistic activity from random and aesthetically meaningless experimentation. This is an authority that Krauss is not shy to embrace. The textual paradigm is premised on an underlying contradiction between an immanent formalism, as promoted by Greenberg, and a formalism that encompasses a range of ideological systems beyond the visual arts, which threatens to reduce art to a generic form of counter-hegemonic critique.

He left October in Crimp discusses the climate at the journal at that time in a interview with Mathias Danbolt. The tendency to associate creative agency primarily with an a priori and usually solitary process of conceptual ideation, rather than the activation of a given concept in and through practice, links two such disparate figures as Sol Lewitt and Thomas Hirschhorn, suggesting the ongoing influence of the Conceptualist paradigm:. Issues of reception, of course, are a point of significant tension in theories of avant-garde art.

An unacceptable reality, their solution is to essentially bribe the King. In return for the protection of the Church against seized revenue, the Clergy will provide an apparently pious, pseudo-legal rationale for the invasion of France. The justification of war from the outset is marinated with baleful motivations of a political ploy by scheming churchmen. It is as if the Archbishop of Canterbury has given himself permission to behave absurdly and illogically, proving it difficult to take his long, rather unlettered explanation with a modicum of seriousness rendering the entire scene sardonic if not ridiculous.

However, some critics have rejected the comedic and tedious delineations of the speech, arguing that the scene would have been taken very seriously by an Elizabethan audience. However, John Sutherland in his provocative essay, Henry V, war criminal? Sutherland thus concludes that the speech is intended to be regarded not just as tedious but comically tedious. Rejecting the veracity of the Salic law allows Henry to claim the throne based on the fact that his great-great-grandmother was the daughter of Philip IV of France. In short, the title of the King of France is illegitimate because it devolved through the female line, therefore the legitimate heir is Henry — by descent through a female line!

Therefore, if Henry is not the legitimate King of England — which he can never be due to his usurper father — he can seldom claim to be the legitimate King of France. This point is further elaborated by C. Hobday in his essay entitled, Image and Irony in Henry V: Yet the point is made so obliquely that only a spectator cognizant of the tangled Plantagenet genealogy is likely to catch it. It is doubtful whether Henry truly requires papal coaching regarding the historical justification of his claim; however, what he does indeed require is the public blessing of the Church. In this fashion, Henry now has God in his favour and any subsequent death caused by war now lie firmly on the shoulders of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The astuteness of Henry is something to behold, and is indicative of a highly intelligent individual who has the ability to expertly shift responsibility to whomever he may seem fit. The war is merely a distraction from the real issue: In order to quell the memory of usurpation, Henry is simply following the advice of his bedridden father. Unfortunately not all giddy minds can be suppressed through the frenzied excitement of foreign quarrels, as some have long memories and remarkable persistence for minds supposedly so giddy. Regrettably for the conspirators, Henry has already foreknown the existence of the plot and subsequently exposes and denounces their treachery, leading to the inevitable conclusion of their execution.

Hence, Henry cannot possibly address the true motives of the conspirators; to do so would draw negative attention to the validity of his claim to the English crown. The conspiracy could have been repealed altogether if Shakespeare had been trying to portray Henry as a virtuous hero; a mirror of all Christian Kings. For if the premise of war is illegitimate, then its consequences, whether they be commendable or reprehensible are, as a result, unjust.

The effect of minor characters on the portrayal of Henry is explicitly evident in the episode with the three soldiers, Alexander Court, John Bates, and Michael Williams, taking place on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt. The scene brings to the fore a reoccurring problem in Henry V criticism, chiefly, the discrepancy of the Chorus in relation to the action it is describing. The role of the Chorus in Henry V is an important topic of discussion in most critical readings of the play; historically, the Chorus has come to signify and affirm the irresistible patriotic fever directed towards the King.

On a similar trajectory, M. Reese considers the role of the Chorus as an advocate for a celebratory reading of the play. The traditional view leaves us with a Chorus affirming the heroic and virtuous delineation of Henry, however, critics have noticed incongruities in choric proclamations leading to interpretations which take the Chorus and consequently the whole play anti — heroically.

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The function of the Chorus is to direct our eye by shaping the events we are about to see. But is it reliable? The frequent and continuous pleas made by the Chorus for the audience to use its imagination are in fact a covert separation of patriotic imagination from reality. Folger Shakespeare Library,