“Badiou and Deleuze: Multiplicity and Event and the Art of Bacon and Rauschenberg”
David Brancaleone, Limerick School of Art and Design
David Brancaleone is a cultural historian with a background in publishing and fine art. He is Acting Course leader in Critical and Contextual Studies (Fine Art) at Limerick School of Art and Design where he lectures in art history and theory.
Paper Introduction:
David is considering the consequences of Alain Badiou’s thought for a social history of art. Bearing in mind the first Eye and Mind paper, he plans is to discuss multiplicity and the philosophy of the event, with in mind Deleuze’s version of multiplicity and to extend the analysis to the works of Rauschenberg and Francis Bacon, from a Badiouian perspective.
The other agenda the paper proposes to address can be formulated with this question: given that art and politics lie at the heart of Badiou’s thought in recent years (being two of his philosophy’s four foundations, what he terms its ‘conditions’); given that he defines truth as: “a new universality against the forced universality of globalization”, where is his art truth-event located, in relation to art history today? Grounding the discussion in the works of Bacon, Rauschenberg, we will explore such questions by drawing selectively on Badiou’s Being and the Event, Infinite Thought, The Century (a reappraisal of High Modernism); the Handbook of Inaesthetics in which he tackles what he calls “the intraphilosophical effects of the single works of art” and “Affirmationist Art Manifesto” in Polemics.
The paper functions on two levels: eyeing the empirical specifics of the art object – the works of Francis Bacon and Robert Rauschenberg paintings (not seen as self-referential, but located in an artistic sequence) – while being mindful of concepts foreign to traditional art historical approaches.
In preparation for this seminar, David has provided some introductory paragraphs on a number of key aspects of Badiou’s thought:
1) Badiou and the Event
2) Third Sketch of a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art
3) Ways in which Badiou’s philosophy impacts on social history of art
David has also prepared a Bibliography of texts on Badiou for your reference. This document may be downloaded from the Eye and Mind events page.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
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2 comments:
Hi David,
It's taken me a while to respond to your lecture, but I wonder if you could say a little more concerning how you see Badiou's 'truth event' getting established in a cultural context. Would such an event in art be constituted in the same way as it would in politics? And does the naming of an event depend upon the scale of its impact, or on the quality (however perceived) of a kind of 'unmanifested potential' available in the given action/project? And how would those things be recognised?
In relation to Rauschenberg specifically, did I understand correctly that you regard him to have successfully remained 'faithful' to aspects of the 'event' of the historical avant-garde? If so, what does faithfulness mean in this case?
How would an event be constituted in art? Given that events are epistemological breaks, rather than empirical occurences, it is clear that these are very rare indeed.
Badiou's philosophy and aesthetics invites us to consider (and assign aesthetic and philosophical value to) change rather than repetition, the new as opposed to the eclectic or appropriation.
As I understand this, recognition of the event requires a two-fold subject: the subject as developed and associated with the event in the course of the event, person, group or subjective entity which can even be an artwork as subject of change; and those who, following the event, name it, assign an identity to it, following research, debate, and examining the consequences of the event itself. The concept of fidelity was first explained at length by Badiou in a book about St Paul, without whose agency as subject there would, in all probability, be no world-wide Christianity as we know it, but only, possibly, the traces of an obscure, monotheistic religious sect. The shift from the late classical Graeco-Roman world to the Christian world was tied in with the event of Christianity, regardless of whether one is a believer or not.
Now for fidelity, in relation to Rauschenberg; if one takes into consideration his contribution to art in relation to the early avantgarde which in itself constituted the event in art of the twentieth century, it makes sense as a continuity to the Duchampian aesthetic which hinges on a critique of the object based art, on the one hand, in favour of an immaterial form of art, more reliant (but not exclusively) on the conceptual. Historically, as we both know, there are several points of contact between Rauschenberg and Duchamp, including, of course, the go-between John Cage. The second form of fidelity I was thinking of relates to montage and its early dadaist form. A loose "open work" (Eco, 1962) form of montage replaces the allegorical form adopted by the Dadaists. This enables Rauschenberg to develop free (maybe sometimes not so free) associations for viewer and himself.
The third form of fidelity I was thinking of consists in having re-routed painting specifically from non figuration to a mode of expression and construction that could include rather than reject visual culture (photography, signage, and so on).
Picasso had done so, the Futurists also, the Dadaists, the Surrealists.
In many ways, the work of Rauschenberg has outlived Pop with which it has often been confused and is, in my view, even more topical today for various reasons.
If we look closely at the Combines, we begin to notice a Modernist grid structure underlying them; this is far from a random mode of organising space on a two-dimensional surface! These grids actually provide the compositional architecture.
But finally, Rauschenberg, in my view, returns to the issues of early Modernism, and specifically Dada and Duchampianp ones. By so doing, without devaluing in any way his contribution to 20th century art, I think his work is a fidelity to it.
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