Made From Movement: Michael Snow's That/Cela/Dat, Marie Menken's Arabesque for Kenneth Anger, and Richard Serra's Double Torqued Ellipse

Angela G Joosse

doi:10.32920/ryerson.14644113.v1

Abstract

Made from Movement works towards a theory of art that is grounded in movement. Thinking through movement allows for consideration of the temporal presence and experience of artworks, and enables an approach to art that crosses aesthetic boundaries. This study is carried out through close hermeneutic studies of three distinct artworks: Michael Snow's video gallery installation That/Cela/Dat (2000), Marie Menken's 16mm film Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1958 – 1961), and Richard Serra's steel sculpture Double Torqued Ellipse (1997). Movement in these artworks does not appear merely as change over time or change of place, but rather as something that is coherent and consistent with itself but does not conclude itself, something that is in continual flux but does not try to achieve an end point, and something that holds forth and protects potent encounters with otherness. Movement, grasped in this way, is irreducible, generative, and tensile. The particular approach to this study is drawn from Samuel Mallin's phenomenological method of Body Hermeneutics. The method continues Heidegger's focus on singular artworks, and accepts that any particularly strong work of art is as worthy of careful study as any noteworthy work of philosophy or theory. Furthermore, drawing on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, the method works from a conception of human consciousness that includes our affective, movingbody, perceptual, as well as cognitive integrations with the world. All four of these distinct, yet overlapping, regions of consciousness are embodied, and thus require physical situatedness with the phenomena to be described. Hence, the phenomenological descriptions in the dissertation are developed from writing done in the presence of the artworks, and the themes of movement are drawn from the phenomena shown by the artworks themselves. Through its embodied approach, and by working itself out through themes of movement encountered in three distinct works of art, Made from Movement contributes insights into topics of temporality, technology, language, femininity, perception, cinema, and art. In addition to offering critical writing on artworks by Snow, Menken, and Serra, the three hermeneutic studies also contribute philosophical reflection on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Irigaray, and Wittgenstein, among others.

Highlights

It centres on the way that each of these artworks offers key insights into the experience and nature of movement, insights that are made explicit through the way each artwork makes distinct use of movement
This dissertation aims to show that it is through the experience and consideration of movement that key insights of these artworks are made explicit
I will first describe the art hermeneutic method quite broadly, and I will give an overview of current work being done using and adapting the Body Hermeneutic method

Summary

Movement This dissertation offers phenomenological studies of three artworks

Marie Menken's Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1958—61), Michael Snow's That / Cela / Dat (2000), and Richard Serra's Double Torqued Ellipse (1997). Specific artworks will work out their own presentations in highly distinct ways, but what I would like to suggest is that artworks pose a particular challenge to theorizing about them and discussing their meanings because they refuse to be dealt with strictly as objects or ideas. They can never be concluded or exhausted. Irreducibility, and incompleteness are integral to the cohesion of oneself as an embodied and situated being in the world This incompleteness is felt in the way that every explicit self-presentation can be felt as partial and remains only ambiguously sketched out, but such incompleteness can open up to astounding insights. As these points shift meaning and move into ambiguity, it becomes possible for viewers to begin to feel “time revolving on itself.” We will see how a temporal experience of Serra's Torqued Ellipses and Torqued Spiral helps us experience a movement that is generativity itself, a commingling of generality and spontaneity

Method 10

Made from Movement

Introduction