"A Sensed Perturbation" Exhibition
Murray Guy
This event has ended.
The works in this show are gestures that strive for attentiveness to affects, situations, atmosphere; finding forms amidst a sense of uncertainty.
In particular, these works evoke the practice of close reading espoused by New Criticism in the 1950s, which called for close attention to the internal dynamics of a text, to the denotation and connotations of language, to structures of paradox. Rather than imposing a theory upon a text, close reading aimed, at best, for a description of the phenomena it attempted to explain.
Simultaneously, though, these artists put pressure on the “closeness” of close reading—the implied proximity to a source—confounding flatness and plenitude, reflecting a disturbed sense of distance and time.
This exhibition takes its departure from, amongst others, Cleanth Brooks’ reading of John Donne; from Moyra Davey’s observation that she mixes “choice and chance somewhat scandalously”; from John Ashbery (cf. For John Clare, 1955); from a report on CNN that mindfulness can reduce stress; from Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on gesture—“What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported”; from a concept of faciality; from Lauren Berlant’s description of “living in a stretched out ‘now’ that is at once both intimate and estranged.”
Media
Schedule
from June 18, 2009 to July 31, 2009