<documenta X><blast> con-pleated space

Bracha Lichtenberg - Ettinger (bracha@easynet.fr)
Sun, 21 Sep 1997 14:27:23 +0200

Lucio, you wrote:

> \never /
> \far from an ascent of a prodigal look that while never /
> \looking back captures its descent to what dear to it /
> \yearns ahead blindly.
> \Art is/
> \language that fields/feels of/
> \hors-texts con-pleats of a /
> \gore: spaces to here/hear/
> \what awl washes 'a'-way/

> /Is that "surface of passion" \
> /what cre-ate-us already alive? In\
> /'art' we feed what there comes for \
> /us hungrier for _space_ then we have \
> /the _time_ for what's 'cooked-up'. \
> /""Beware"" stands there, for taste is now\
> /that which we ask "it" a-bout our flesh. \

you wrote this.

Dare I still add:
The Thing, I wrote once, is traumatic and aching, and we do not know where
it hurts and that it hurts. Artwork arises our desire to meet its gaze when
it succeeds to mysteriously embody a space in the Thing; it enthralls us to
follow its gaze, and in face of that hope to access the Thing that the
artwork radiates, we abandon our defenses and weaves into the artwork even
our own trauma. The co-poiesis of I and non-I, their co-emergence and
cofading, composes archaic trans-subjectivity where the Thing is partially
shared. When this Thing wakes up, a channel for marking new instances of
subjectivity-as-encounter is opened. Through this, in the matrixial
borderspace, the artist as a partial subject takes part and testifies
to/for an unknown other or rather, it is the matrixial threads of the
artwork which testify to the trauma of an-other in withness. Traces
deviating from an unknown Other etch imprints in me unconsciously; traces
abandoning me still keep in touch with me via my unknown Others, via you.
We exchange and keep a distance in proximity that allows the artist a
freedom to act and allows the viewer emphatic com-passion as well as the
freedom for subversion and resistance, for re-in/di-fusing: possibility for
re-diffusion and re-infusion of elements in the transferential borderspace.
This transferential borderspace not only finds its echoes in the viewer;
its vibrations not only impregnate the viewer's psychic borderspace but
also, the affective investment of the viewer awakens the artwork again and
again from its status of object only, it activates, once more, the Thing.
Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger

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