Abstract
FCJ-226 ‘And they are like wild beasts’: Violent Things in the Anthropocene
Highlights
What can a chair, spoon, table, horse, sow, or wheel do when accused of murder? The Anthropocene has rearranged our material relationships: humans are a geological force ensnaring every object within reach into our diabolical plan to reconfigure the planet through increasing networks of violence
The work was Circular Facts (2009, figure 2) by New Zealand artist Ruth Buchanan: an installation based on the script of a performance Buchanan staged after researching the strange and highly publicised disappearance of British writer Agatha Christie.[2]
Buchanan’s fascination with the story lead her to spend a summer living in a hotel; the two chairs in the installation are from this hotel
Summary
On another day, there is an elephant. The gallery is a white cube, every surface shines, reflecting the elephant’s pitted grey skin. The monad contained attributes of internal energy and perception and no two were alike (Conway, 1996) Arguing that her views were explicitly “anti-Cartesian”, Conway stated that there was no such thing as dead matter, only matter in which the soul was transforming into a new material by continuously travelling up and down a dynamic, energetic and infinite staircase (Wayne White, 2008: 48, 52). Like Conway’s water that breeds fish, these are rocks that can animate the ghosts of bodies that previously lived here and hewed the stone that waits in the circle. Conway’s processual, organic life offers a vitalistic metaphysics that will be developed further by Leibniz It is magical: ‘Each part of matter can be thought of as a garden full of plants or a pond full of fish. Dwyer reminds us that we are yet to see if humans can do the same
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