Ecstatic alchemies - elusive ecologies the 'practice of the wild' in art

Lab seminar series spring 2024

In addressing various ways of the practice of the wild in art, this Spring La will move between two colossal relevant themes: Eros-Thanatos and the Incorporeal as a third state of matter in ecstasis.

Eros-thanatos

For Nietzsche, the Dionysian is alive to instinct; it carries within itself the insight into the darkness of life. The instinct of Life that necessarily goes through the pulsation”/the drive to death. Aby Warburg envisaged the psychic drama of culture in his ”Dialektik des Monstrums” (dialectic of the monster), the complex dialectical knot of the subject with the mysterious Monstrum, the combat with the monster in ourselves. But as Nietzsche has argued, art is the way to overcome tragic life since art is not an imitation of natural reality, but the metaphysical supplement to that reality, set beside it in order to overcome it. Tragic myth, in so far as it belongs to art at all, participates fully in the purpose of art to provide metaphysical transfiguration. Nature – as an artist – provides the model, insofar as two artistic energies, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, burst forth from nature herself “without the mediation of the human artist.” (BT 2.38, cf. 4-5) These two drives entangled in the human psyche, Eros-Thanatos, the instinct to Life, the death drive, emerge in the unconscious fantasy at work, a ”symbol written on the sand of the flesh” (Lacan). In the trace of its movement, An ineffable vignette: the Pathosformeln, the trace of the movement of the imaginary breeze, its afterlife (Nachleben). A ghost – the INCORPOREAL.

The spring seminar will work on elusive ecologies born on the imaginary extracted from mythical episodes ever reinvented and revivified. The notion of metamorphosis as change and transformation of form and material in the creative process will be in focus, as it occurs in various media, from lead and mud, seeds and corals (as elements of Life), to the immutable gold, and most occult virtual.

The incorporeal - Tropes of indeterminacy

Elusive Ecologies aims to explore and uncover new innate forms of artistic expression of body that goes beyond its confines restricted by the normative discourse. This term, the Lab will activate a theoretical apparatus detected in the Stoic notion of the “incorporeal,” which has been critically engaged by Gilles Deleuze in his Logique du sense as “the faint incorporeal mist which escapes from bodies,” and lately by Elisabeth Grosz in The Incorporeal. Elusive Ecologies takes further the Stoic modes of distribution of the incorporeal (place, time, lekta, void) and test them on specific contemporary (and Modern) performative events emerging as pure fields of embodiment. Two paradigmatic tropes of indeterminacy emerge as distinct forms of “ideality,” as in the in-corporeal butoh dance, and as a “materialist imaginary” in performing atmo-sphere and the metakimo-sphere, which are “though not without mystery” (Deleuze).