“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.
