Artistic Gesture Research Articles

Den uundgåelige opløsning af afsavnets verden: Situationisterne som manifestskrivere

The Inevitable Liquidation of the World of Privation: The Situationists as Manifesto Writers:The article presents a reading of the short, four-page manifesto written in 1960 by the Situationist International and published in the fourth issue of the situationist journal Internationale situationniste. Through an analysis of both the text and the glossy cover of the issue it is argued that the situationists sought to subvert the spectacle while coming dangerously close to staging this subversion as yet another spectacle to be consumed. According to the situationists’ ultra leftist approach, modern capitalist society was characterized by alienation and boredom but held together by images and representations that prevented people from realising another life and taking matters into their own hands. The situationists tried to attack this repressive image-world, drawing on both the historical avant-garde and the revolutionary tradition advancing an all-encompassing revolutionary approach that could not take place as an isolated artistic gesture or as a political action but had to address all of human existence. This total-istic approach for better or worse no longer seems to be an option for present artistic and activist projects.

La Voix et le geste: Andre Frenaud et ses peintres

The contribution of painting and individual painters to the development of modern French poetic practice, and in particular to the poetics of the book, is one for which Yves Peyré's Peinture et poésie: le dialogue par le livre (Gallimard, 2001) makes the most substantial existing case. The present work explores the idea of dialogue central to that general survey in considering an important and relatively inaccessible dimension of a major individual poetic œuvre. It comprises fifteen essay-length presentations of André Frénaud's ‘principal’ collaborative projects which, taken together, establish both the importance of those projects for an understanding of Frénaud's poetic work and work processes, and the rich and diverse aesthetic potential of the collaboratively produced books to which they gave rise. The number of such projects aside, there is something both appropriate and challenging to the basic premise of the livre de dialogue for a poetic voice already fundamentally dialogical. Frénaud's poetics characteristically reveals, ‘par son mouvement même, l'identité de l'identité et de la non-identité’ (Bernard Pingaud, ‘Préface’, Il n'y a pas de paradis (Gallimard, 1967, p. 12)), in what Daniel Leuwers (contrasting him with Char and Guillevic, two other poets born in 1907) has called ‘le chassé-croisé des voix antagonistes, qui caractérise l’œuvre' (Europe, 734–35 (1990), p. 9). Some of the readings here are explicit on the complexity of the dialogical template as it relates to Frénaud's collaborations, the resultant book becoming multiply dialogical ‘jusqu'au vertige’ (Stéphanie Thonnerieux, on La Femme de ma vie, done with Jean Fautrier). Christian Doumet, writing on the collaboration with Ubac, questions the very possibility of reading the products of such ‘marriages’. Other contributions, such as that of Jean-Marie Gleize on the collaboration with Alechinsky, problematize discourses of the artistic gesture. Perhaps the dominant effort on view is, however, that of envisaging each book as a complex unity and of deriving meanings in terms of that postulated unity — a position well-grounded in the existence of the book-object, of which there are many detailed and tantalizing descriptions in this volume. Each of the commentaries here could have served as prefaces or accompaniments to the collaborative work to which they refer. Detached from those works, they are required to establish their validity otherwise. Jean-Yves Debreuille develops an editorial position which is both prudent and creative. The high-quality colour reproduction of representative plates or pages from each commented work adequately addresses the problem of visual quotation, while never attempting to mask the secondarity of the volume to its chosen, complex objects. Each contribution is conceived of as a construction of the supplementation of meaning brought about in the contact between two artistic practices. This construction is in turn thought to pre-figure a readerly experience, itself analogous to that of the artistic process — inviting us to enter into ‘l'oscillation de l'artiste, dont chaque livre porte témoignage’ (p. 11). Debreuille's argumentation sits well with the idea of Frénaud's livres de dialogue as amplifications of a multiplicity observable in his unaccompanied work. Interestingly, the collaborations are shown to occur frequently at an intermediate stage in Frenaud's creative process — his poetic texts, generally reworked, reclaim their autonomy before a wider subsequent readership. This volume, a multi-layered invitation to dialogue, re-opens the book on those texts also.

Chalk Steps on the Museum Floor

This article argues against the well-established wisdom in sociology of art that a sudden artistic or institutional gesture can `elevate' an ordinary object to the status of `artwork'. Instead, it affirms that there is a gradual process of `becoming art'. The mechanism of artistic activity does not consist of a single transformation of one huge difference into something artistically significant; it is rather related to the deployment of various small objective differences, their extension, intensification, repetition, and stabilization. It is the tempo of transformation that matters, but not the nature of these differences. Located in the objects, they are empirically describable. That is why the article follows ethnographically the process of installation of a chalk Bruegel copy on the floor of Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris in 1999 and depicts different sequences and rhythms of change in the materiality of all participants in an art installation.

Unilateral Jump Behavior in Young Professional Female Ballet Dancers

In the field of dance, lateral body actions should be differently influenced by training. Classes should develop symmetrical jump behavior by the alternate working of the two body sides. In contrast, asymmetrical training effect linked to hemispheric laterality should be also expected. Indeed, for aesthetic reasons, the preferred leg has to give the jump direction while the other leg has to carry out the impulsion during take-off. In addition, and for functional reasons, the preferred leg also has to ensure a soft landing and to avoid imbalance upon landing. To address the question, we studied ten professional right-footed female ballet dancers in a unilateral experimental task: the maximal vertical jump (MVJ). The MVJ height was compared for each leg in ten trials. In addition, the side of the leg usually involved in a choreographic bilateral task was determined. All these right-footed dancers selected their left leg as the impulsion leg for the choreographic jump so as to reserve the right leg for the expression of the artistic gesture linked to emotional laterality. However, ANOVA did not show differences between the right and left legs in MVJ. In these young ballerinas, jump actions of the two body sides seem to develop symmetrically by class training effects.

A Cyclopean, Evil Eye: On Performance, Gender and Photography

One of the questions which continues to be of interest concerning performance art is its relation to photography, and through photography to gender and sexual identity. At a superficial level, of course, photography has been a medium of convenience to performance artists – one of the few ways in which much past work now exists. However, as Mary Kelly and others have argued, performance has been seen to be much more deeply a part of that tradition in modern art which, at least since Baudelaire, opposed the intrusion of photographic reproduction. Performance, like abstract expressionism with its irrefutable presence of the artistic gesture, or minimalism with its emphasis on experience and duration, would seem to be not merely resistant to photography, but entirely opposed to its “cyclopean evil eye”, the distinctly malevolent look that converted “every visible aspect of the world into a static, consumable image” (Morris 203). Refuting photography, performance appears as the logical end-point of the modernist path of self-reflexiveness – a path that was initiated by painting in response to the technology of photography, as the affirmation and self-definition of art as purely subjective, living gesture, and as the pure inscription of bodily gesture and presence in the work of art. In fact, against those tendencies within the avant-garde of the 1960s that expelled gesture, denied expression, and contested the notion of an essential creativity through photography, performance was the return with a vengeance of artistic subjectivity in the figure of the artist (in privileged masculine terms) himself: his person, his image, his gestures (Kelly 95). As Kelly writes further on, “the discourse of the body in art ismore than a repetition of the eschatological voices of abstract expressionism: the actual experience of the body fulfills the prophecy of the painted mark” (Kelly 96).

The audio interface

This essay is concerned with the idea that “dtimbral behaviour” is as much a part of the identity of an instrument as is the timbre itself. The nature and importance of the interface between daudio-feedback (particularly the role of timbral behaviour) and dartistic gesture is examined against the historical background of the authors involvement in the development and introduction of one of the major electronic musical instruments of recent years, the DX7 FM synthesiser. Starting from an early intuitive and naive attraction to the “dvelocity sensitivity” parameter and the dBC1 breath controller, an attempt is made to apply some understanding by the examination of FM as a tool for timbral modeling and the special role of the dmodulation index. More generalised issues surrounding the idea of timbral behaviour are then developed which relate to the interface between timbral behaviour and instrumental artistic gesture, (pitch and effort), and which can be applied both to today's electronic music and the manufa...

Narrative, symbol, and psychotherapy: Emotion as experienced action and enactment of a gesture

This paper explores a view of both art and therapeutic emotion as primary acts of mind, or lived experiences. Processes of artistic gesture or emotional enactment construct symbols from personal (body or physiological) and interpersonal (object or social) contexts. Felt action tendencies occur in the spaces between self and body, and between self and object. Adequate research and theory in emotion, art, and therapy requires acknowledgement of these processes as they symbolize and construct these relationships. An understanding of these processes as experienced and enacted calls for a narrative rather than a paradigmatic approach.