NYAB Event - Eric Baudelaire "Anabases"

Eric Baudelaire "Anabases"

Elizabeth Dee

This event has ended.

Elizabeth Dee is pleased to present Anabases, Eric Baudelaire’s second solo show at the gallery, which is at once a continuation and a departure from Circumambulation, his 2007 inquiry into the cyclical and hypnotic relationship between image and event. Once again, the work presented is part of a greater cycle where pieces in different media are federated by an allegory of movement. But where Circumambulation navigated around a space left empty by a particular event that unfolded on September 11th, and the ensuing effect it had on our lives and our relationship to images, the ambulation at work in the current cycle stems from a literary motif inspired by Xenophon’s Anabasis. And yet, it isn’t so much a story or a destination that the show refers to. Instead, Anabases is an inquiry into the idea of a movement, the internal logic of which is embedded in the structure of the works on display.

What kind of movement is inscribed in Anabases? One that originates in Xenophon’s historical epic, also known as the Persian Expedition, which recounts a leaderless retreat of ten thousand Greek mercenaries in search of a way home through unknown lands following the unexpected death of the Persian prince who had retained them. The itinerary becomes more allegorical in its many adaptations, including those by the poets St John Perse and Paul Celan, the 1979 cult film Warriors, its imminent Tony Scott remake, an Xbox game, and a lecture by Alain Badiou who employed the idea in his seminary on the 20th century at the Collège International de Philosophie. What the various incarnations of anabasis have in common is a principle of wandering, the notion of a journey into the new which isn’t a simple return because it forges its own path without knowing whether it leads towards home. Badiou defines anabasis as “a free invention of a meandering which will have been a return, a return which, prior to the wandering, did not exist as a return.” (1) And in tracing this undecidability, he notes that the notion of a disjunctive synthesis of will and wandering is embedded in the Greek etymology of the word itself since the verb αναβανειν (“to anabase,” as it were), means both “to embark” and “to return.”