Still grasping for straws… I have flaneured though the www in the same mannor as I search and flick though books, newly brewed coffee and Christmas Pantone in hand.
The Eyes have it.
bell hooks quote – The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it’s to imagine what is possible. – Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, 2012 bell hooks.
Idea for essay title and question.
If the eye is the window to the soul, may the viewing audience be reawakened to think radically about Utopia –
Is Olafur Eliasson “Utopia“ a participatory radical performance?
Olafur Eliasson’s Utopia – Made for the exhibition Utopia Station 2003, this work consists of a metallic tube painted white, fitted with a projection foil and a button at one end. When viewers press the button, the word “Utopia” flashes up. – – https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK101011/your-utopia#slideshow
50th Venice Biennale, Italy, 2003
Photo: Giorgio Boato
New eyes – susan sontag – https://blog.fitzcarraldoeditions.com/susan-sontag-critic-crusader/
She was, as ever, drawn to art that upends assumptions, challenges prejudices — turns them inside out and forces us to see the world through new eyes. She was not afraid of deep thinking or the delights to be had from its rigors. She had many heroes of the mind, not least Theodor Adorno, whose love of the aphoristic paradox, eclectic curiosities, and commitment to critical thinking were a model for Sontag’s own aspirations.
All seeing Eye of Horus –
Eyes on boats –
Eyes afloat
Eyes in the sky –
Thinking about eyes in art work.
Ali smith barbra Hepworth – Though the eyes of Hepworth – the making of life and art out of matter. http://blog.fitzcarraldoeditions.com/looking-world-eyes-barbara-hepworth/
The Eye of Providence: The symbol with a secret meaning?
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201112-the-eye-of-providence-the-symbol-with-a-secret-meaning
Participation / performances
The Theatre Bizarre
A modern horror omnibus inspired by the over-the-top shocks of ParisÂ’ early 20th century Theatre du Grand Guignol.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1763316/mediaviewer/rm89961216/?ref_=tt_ov_i
More eyes – its the eyes that draw me in and set the scene, “I could see the fear in their eyes”.
Other.
Jacques Ranciere ‘The Emancipated Spectator’
Feminist Ecologies-Changing Environments in the Anthropocene-Editors Lara Stevens, Peta Tait, Denise Varney.
I apply Merleau-Ponty’s theories of embodied phenomenology to thinking through the ways in which spectators watch live performance and view art. Such embodied phenomenologies can make an observer aware of the physiological effects of bodily looking and emotionally feeling in response to a live performance or an art object. In the same way, an encounter with a different species body might cause the automatic phenomenological sensory engagement in the lived world to stall momentarily and make an observer self-aware that he or she is enfolding and unfolding the flesh of the world; that is, engaged in a process of ‘fleshing’ the surroundings (Tait 2015).
https://omny.fm/shows/climate-conversations/lara-stevens-opens-new-vistas-on-the-climate-crisi
“The climate debate isn’t just about science; it’s also about gender and power. Ecofeminism takes this seriously, and ecofeminist philosophy is uniquely positioned to help us reimagine our place in the world and the ways in which we can care for the environment”, the ABC said in an introduction to a session on the Philosophers Zone entitled “Feminism, ecology and motherhood“.
Dr Lara Stevens talks about feminism, or “feminisms”, Val Plumwood and Mother Earth, and why it’s not “Father Earth”.
Dr Stevens, a researcher with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, talks about why women are playing such a leading role in humanity’s response to the climate crisis.
Feminism, hierarchy, nature, culture, rethinking gender Our relationship with Nature, Donna Haraway.
Brecht – anti audience catharsis
What Do Marxists Have To Say About Art?
As Marx declared in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: ‘The object of art, like any other product, creates an artistic and beauty-enjoying public. Production thus produces not only an object for the individual, but also an individual for the object’.
The Marxist art critic John Berger in his Ways of Seeing (a 1972 four-part television series, later adapted into a book, Ways of Seeing) was hailed by many people for helping to deepen their understanding of art. Berger argued that it was impossible to view a reproduction of ‘old masters’ (generally paintings by European artists before 1800) in the way they were seen at the time of their production; that the female nude was an abstraction and distortion of reality, reflecting contemporary male ideals; that an oil painting was often a means of reflecting the status of an artist’s patron; and that contemporary advertising utilises the skills of artists and the latest artistic techniques merely to sell things for consumption in a capitalist market.
Berger’s work remains controversial and has been revisited many times, particularly since his death in January 2017. Many have argued that he over-simplifies and that he incorporates the deeper perceptions of others such as Walter Benjamin, working at the interface between Marxism and cultural theory. Some have asked (for example) why there is no reference to feminist theorists in Berger’s chapter on the ‘male gaze’. However Berger’s work needs to be seen in context as a polemical response to the ‘great artists’ approach which characterises much establishment art history and ‘art appreciation’ typified by Kenneth Clark’s (1969) Civilisation television series.
Aristotle’s Coercive System of Tragedy
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jewestla/boal.htm
Excerpted from Augusto Boal:
Besides his study of the views of Milton, Bernays and Racine, Butcher goes to Aristotle’s own Politics to find the explanation of the word catharsis which is not to be found in the Poetics. Catharsis is utilized there to denote the effect caused by a certain kind of music on patients possessed by a given type of religious fervor. The treatment “consisted in applying movement to cure movement, in soothing the internal trouble of the mind by a wild and restless music.” According to Aristotle, the patients subjected to that treatment returned to their normal state, as if they had undergone a medical or purgative treatment – that is, cathartic.8
Sarah Chalkie Cloonan 