William Forsythe: choreography as a reflection of social spheres
"In his installation performances such as Human Writes or Heterotopia, to which Forsythe has dedicated an increasing amount of his time in recent years, choreography becomes a social practice. Forsythe's installations are controlled test arrangements in which all the participants can observe themselves, their bodies and their movements together. When a performance like Human Writes deals in substance with the difficulties surrounding universal human rights, it becomes clear where the potential of dance and movement can lie. After all, it's not abstract universal laws alone that guarantee our co-existence. It is much more our physical actions, our daily movements that create and shape the community. Herein lies the political meaning of Forsythe's notion of dance. He creates spaces where he places people in a new, unknown relationship to themselves so that they reflect differently on their (social) spheres and in so doing explore their own potential scope for action."
(Gerald Siegmund, May 2008, Goethe-Institut)
Fig.3 Dominik Mentzos, "Human Writes", performance-Installation by William Forsythe and Kendall Thomas [http://www.theforsythecompany.com/pressphotos/humanwrites/].
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Marker's image-inventory: thesaurus rather than taxonomy
"[Chris] Marker's production of an inventory for his filmic archive through gathering - shooting, finding existing footage, and editing - is enabled by this double power of the image. On one hand, the image-inventory simply lists images as instances of a collection, allowing each to resonate on its own, evoking its own possible meaning, descriptions, feelings, and thoughts and on the other, the shared qualitative aspect that links the images creates a pictorial inventory or catalogue of the growing filmic archive. The particularity of this catalogue is noteworthy. In linking images or collection-items by shared qualitative criteria, rather than by qualitative measures, this inventory constitutes a thesaurus of the collection rather than a taxonomy or classification. For, whereas the former loosely groups instances conceptually (words/images sharing a concept), the latter tightly organises the archive nomologically (according to a law: alphabetically, chronologically, etc.). This difference is crucial: classification is linear, laying out flat the vast heterology that is the archive, taming difference through a system that is based on sameness - items or terms belonging to the same latter of the alphabet, originating in the same year, being related to the same place etc. - imposing order through a movement from the many to the one. The inventory-building of the thesaurus, on the other hand, is rhizomorphous, starting from similarities and affinities and proceeding three-dimensionally from the one to the many, from similarity to difference. The shared quality or concept, the broader term of the thesaurus, moves through analogical bifurcations and creates a network of related, narrower terms, and arborescence of possible meanings without a classificatory claim on, or hope for precision, certainty and unique locatability. As such, the thesaurus enables a radically different kind of access to the archive from that gained through classification. Classification privileges individual items of a collection through a structure which allows their precise tracking while the thesaurus creates a conceptual archive from the archive that highlights the connections between items."
(Uriel Orlow, 2002)
2). Orlow, Uriel (2002) 'Chris Marker: The Archival Powers of the Image'. In: Comay, Rebecca and Knechtel, John, (eds.) Alphabet city #8: lost in the archives. Alphabet City Media Inc., Toronto, Canada, pp. 436-451. ISBN 0887846432
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Cabinets of Curiosity: ways of knowing through similitude
"the constitution of heterogeneity as a world of objects separate and distinct from the viewing subject. The 'heterogeneous' world is identifiable with the position of the objectivised subject during the Renaissance and that identification is organised through similitude into an homology between a viewing subject and a multifarious object world. If the classical age can be said to be about anything it is, as Foucault has shown, about the move away from ways of knowing through similitude to ways of knowing through mathesis and representation (Foucault, M.1989. The Order of Things). While we might take issue with the speed and degree of completion of this epistemic shift, representation as a way of knowing, as a form of gaze, comes to be constituted through the separation of the subject from the world and the development of an idea of material heterogeneity as something Other to that subject."
(Hetherington, Kevin. 1999 p.51-73)
[Hooper-Greenhill's (quoted in Hetherington 1999) contention is that during the Renaissance the dominant approach to understanding was informed by ways of knowing through similitude. She contrasts this approach with ways of knowing through, what Foucault calls mathesis (Foucault 2003), and representation. Hooper-Greenhill's discussion is useful for understanding Western understanding's general shift after this period towards nomological strategies and the rise of Modernism. She presents her analysis in reference to the emergence of the cabinets of curiosity during the Baroque period in Europe which became the forerunners to the Modern museum and fine art galleries.]
Foucault, M. (2003). The Order Of Things. London, Routledge: 156-158.
Hetherington, K. (1999). From Blindness to Blindness: Museums, Heterogeneity and the Subject. Actor Network Theory And After. J. Law and J. Hassard.
Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1992). Museums and the Construction of Knowledge. Leicester, Leicester University Press.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
