Friday, June 3rd, 15.30 – 18.30, at Università di Verona, Room 1.1
Abstract:
My presentation examines two differing notions of violence apparent in the theories of art in the 20th Century. First, I shall clarify the role of the “violent logos”, as Jacques Derrida formulated it, in the discourse of Modernism which insisted on the unified form and concept of art. Secondly, I shall present the subsequent postmodern shift into a kind of “violence of the sensuous”: in visual arts this denotes an emphasis on the materiality of the medium and an outburst of what exceeds logical and conceptual approach to the work of art. What is at stake in this trajectory from one type of violence to the other, and whether the postmodern “material turn” of visual arts can even be characterized as violence, shall be my questions.
In particular, I shall present the work of philosophers Georges Bataille and Jean-Luc Nancy as introducing the notion of ‘touch’ to replace the paradigm of pure visibility of Modernist painting. Thus they both have enlarged the scope of art by emphasizing its tangible materiality. This is also evident in the work of many artists, and I shall briefly consider few key works to analyze their function in deconstructing the violent hegemony of the rational visuality in art.
