FORMS OF IMAGINING 18.12.09–30.01.10 PROJECT ARTS CENTRE
Clodagh Emoe Curated by Tessa Giblin
Introduction Ten Theses on Philosophy, Art and Tragedy List of Works Biographies
1 6 14 16
If there was to be one overseeing eye which has been watching the chorus, stage and audience of Clodagh Emoe’s Cult of Engagement, it would be spirit of the cross-roads, Papa Legba. The gathered elements within the exhibition – The Approach, Azimuth and Parodos – perform historically recognisable roles; a stage resembling travelling adaptations of Greek theatre during the twilight of its form, or the Chorus, looming out of the semi-darkness, echoing an ancient role of revelation and discourse. Papa Legba, who was called upon to open communications between the deities and the people, was able to speak all known languages and controlled the doorway of communication at the spiritual crossroads. Some of this attitude has found its place in Emoe’s installation, which at once reveals a route of procession, and at the same time removes any presence of performance. If one were to enter through The Approach – a large, scented and perforated curtain – and call to Papa Legba for advice, the silence of his reply would only heighten the unnerving sense of expectation in the room, an expectation underlined by a low, reverberating, sound. This sound which fills the room is part of the event approach to exhibition-making that Emoe has followed in the months leading towards her newly commissioned solo exhibition at Project Arts Centre, attempting to create a space where the event is anticipated. The artist has been informed by a history of ritualistic induction and theatrical devices as channels that can herald a community as something other than a limited audience. Azimuth, a round, wooden stage with carved and stained markings is flanked by a series of flags – petrified as monuments of ‘kairos’, a concept used by the ancient Greeks to describe time that is neither chronological nor representable, but that spans an event or action. The markings on this stage remind us of coded messages and meaning. Through the aerial archaeology of its design, we can listen to the thoughts of the past, with marks made on the land still speaking in supplication to the unknown greatness of whatever was thought to be watching. Projected onto a dark brown wall behind us, and thus insulated a little from the obvious glare of the film spectacle, is the projection of a seemingly static landscape. This is the context into which an unannounced chorus emerges slowly out of the twilight of the magic hour, becoming present in the space where we least expect them.
CULT OF ENGAGEMENT
Introduction
Clodagh Emoe, Cult of Engagement, installation view, Project Arts Centre, 2009. Photography: Sean Breithaupt
In the early days of Greek tragedy the Chorus would enter the space of theatre through the parodoi, stage-flanking processional routes. They had evolved from the dithyrambic chorus, who were a band of transformed people, for whom social histories and civic positions were consciously and entirely forgotten in the worship of Dionysus. As Greek tragedy developed, the role of the chorus moved to the periphery of the activity, although their position became more influential. They were a united body, able to reveal elements of truth, unknown as yet by the actors themselves. Thus the chorus were the eyes and the mirror of the audience, able to see in, around, and through the action taking place on the stage. ‘Parodos’, the chorus of Cult of Engagement, has a more ambiguous character – it is united in silence and like an unreadable congregation, indecipherable in its purpose – neither revealing, nor concealing. These witnesses both perform an event in undisclosed landscape, and at the same time confront us in our capacity as spectators in a room – we are caught between their masked gaze and the stage behind, bound into a ritual as suggestive as it is material. Tessa Giblin, Curator of Visual Arts, Project Arts Centre
2/3
Clodagh Emoe, Azimuth, 2009 Wood, cloth, ink, 4m × 2.2m × 2.2m. Photography: Sean Breithaupt
Clodagh Emoe, Parodos, 2009, production image. Photography: Sean Breithaupt
4/5
Ten Theses on Philosophy, Art and Tragedy For Clodagh 1
Aesthetics is philosophy’s discourse on art. The domain of art is the domain of the aesthetic, i.e. that which is sensuously present to perception or intuition (aisthesis). Philosophy’s discourse on art – aesthetics – encloses and dominates artworks, placing them within the sphere or circle of philosophical justification or legitimation. For philosophy, art can only be justified or legitimated through the aesthetic judgement that philosophy imposes upon artworks. This tendency is most powerfully at work in Plato and Hegel. The basic question of classical aesthetics is ‘what is the beautiful?’ What has to be realised is that this question is a philosophical question, and it is more explicitly philosophical when the aesthetic question is posed in moral language: ‘is this a good artwork?’ Our aesthetic judgements about artworks (this is a good or beautiful poem, painting or film, or alternatively it stinks) are philosophical judgements. Literary criticism or art criticism, insofar as it offers judgement about the beauty and value of literary works, is also philosophical. The philosophical tradition – that is, the dominant Platonic/Christian metaphysical tradition; there are other traditions, like classical and modern materialism – has justified art by subordinating it to philosophy. As Hegel writes, ‘for us, the concept of the beautiful and art is a presupposition given by the system of philosophy’. In the moment of philosophy’s summation in the metaphysics of Hegel, art is declared by philosophical discourse to be ‘a thing of the past’. Was Hegel right? Is art over? Is its place taken over by philosophy? It is difficult to assent to such questions. But can we say that art has retained the meaningfulness it possessed in the ancient and medieval views of the world? (Think of Medieval religious art, Gothic architecture). Maybe Hegel has a point. Does art disclose a world for us, or does it – and this is Heidegger’s thought – disclose the absence of a world, the worldlessness or poverty of our times?
6/7
3
What is required is a deconstruction of philosophy’s discourse on art, a deconstruction of both aesthetics and the determination of literature as secondary to the work of truth. To do this, we can draw on the thread of ancient tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides) and the wider theme of the tragic in general. Tragedy is the clue in the deconstruction of metaphysics. 4
Three thoughts: (i) Why should the beginning of philosophy or metaphysics in Plato – a beginning that has resonated for 2,500 years and fundamentally determined our traditional understanding of the relation between art, science, society and politics, and continues to determine our understanding – presuppose the exclusion of the tragic poets from the philosophically well-ordered polis described or imagined in the Republic? The exclusion of poetry from the Platonic polis is essentially an exclusion of the tragic poets. In a deep sense, philosophy and tragedy represent rival interpretations of the political form of society and rival discourses of legitimation. (ii) Why should the overturning of Platonism or metaphysics in Nietzsche’s work call for a return to ‘tragic insight’ and, in the early writing, a rebirth of tragedy? Why should what Heidegger sees as the end of philosophy in Nietzsche’s overturning of Platonism call for the beginning of tragic thinking?
CULT OF ENGAGEMENT
2
Philosophy is metaphysics, Heidegger said. That is, philosophy is the division or bifurcation of experience into the realms of being and appearance, the supersensuous and the sensuous, episteme and doxa, knowledge and opinion. Philosophy is Platonism, and that the governing oppositional hierarchies of metaphysics flow from Plato’s dialogues. The history of philosophy, of metaphysics, is the subordination of the sensuous, the apparent, the phenomenal, the realm of aesthesis. Philosophy is a discourse with its eyes set on an invisible truth that is posited against and over the apparent untruth of the artwork. In Nietzsche’s terms, there is a raging discordance between art and truth that begins with Platonism and which Nietzsche’s work sets about overturning.
(iii) Thus, the general form of my question is: what is the function of tragedy at the beginning and end of philosophy or metaphysics? Might not tragedy provide a frame through which and within which we might see philosophical discourse as a thing of the past? 5
Everything is hinged around the double movement of the philosophical tradition and its tragic critique or inversion. The task of a deconstruction is to show the complex articulation of this double movement: philosophy and tragedy, philosophy within tragedy, tragedy within philosophy. For example, in Ecce Homo Nietzsche describes himself as a ‘tragic philosopher’ and in The Birth of Tragedy employs the figure of the ‘music-practising Socrates’. What might tragic philosophy or philosophical tragedy mean? 6
A parenthetical remark: what I have said so far is that tragedy is enclosed and dominated, but at same time excluded, at the beginning of philosophy, as the beginning of philosophy, and is employed as a critique of philosophy at the end of the philosophical tradition in Nietzsche. We are left, then, with the articulation of these two moments, metaphysics and tragedy, that is, we are left with the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry still raging. Perhaps this is right; perhaps we should reconsider the quarrel as a conflict or war that cannot be readily resolved or ended. Perhaps we need both philosophy, the love of knowledge, the claim to universal validity (i.e. what is the beautiful?), evidence, reason and scientificity, and the disruption of that claim through aesthetic and tragic experience. That is, perhaps we should not see art as a replacement for science (understood as the legitimate discourse of knowledge), but in Nietzsche’s words ‘as a supplement to science’.
Clodagh Emoe, The Approach, 2009 Cloth, scent, 4.2m × 2.3m. Photography: Sean Breithaupt
8/9
7
A deconstruction of the relation between philosophy and tragedy will not simply have local effects. For example, the exclusion of tragedy in the Republic is done for what can be described as political reasons. Tragedy is political, or rather, tragedy is an art form that legislates for the community, whether we think of the Oresteia (which recounts the foundation of a just polis) or the Antigone (which dramatizes the break up of the community through its feminine ironization). The political horizon of tragedy is also clearly at work in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, where it is a question of the rebirth of what Nietzsche calls the German ‘essence’ through the spirit of music, in particular the music of Wagner. (Happily, the later Nietzsche criticised his early enthusiasm for Wagner, turned to the music of Bizet and condemned his early theory of tragedy as ‘offensively Hegelian’). For Plato, it is philosophy and not tragedy that should provide the discourse of political legitimation; that can decide upon the nature of the just polis. For Plato, the only just polis is one where the leaders of the community possess a knowledge of justice, that is to say, the only just polis is one governed by those who know, i.e. philosophers. Therefore, philosophers should be kings. 8
Another parenthesis: we should remember that historical Athens also took a political decision to exclude philosophy from the polis in the trial and death of Socrates. It is necessary to think hard about the relation between philosophy and tragedy in terms of how both relate to what we might call ‘democratic experience’: that is, is philosophy, as Hannah Arendt contends, the voice of critique and interrogation essential to democracy, or is philosophy, as Karl Popper contends, a form of intellectual protototalitarianism and the enemy of an open society? 9
To conclude sceptically: are we convinced of the legitimacy of ancient tragedy? Let’s not forget, it’s an art form exclusively acted out by men in a polis where only male citizens took part in the democratic process. Is not ancient tragedy, outside and beyond any romanticism, simply a dramatic apologetics for the governing myths of Greek patriarchy? Are not Aeschylus and Sophocles simply apologists for the brutality of the Greeks and the rape of Troy? The question of gender, which I here borrow from Christa Wolf’s wonderful book, Cassandra, turns on our interpretation of the role of a large number of female figures in tragedies, such as Cassandra, Clytemnestra, Antigone, Medea and Phaedra. If tragedy is the aesthetic apologia for imperial, patriarchal aggression, then can we not ask, with Wolf, whether or not we are ‘beyond tragedy’? 10/11
Simon Critchley
CULT OF ENGAGEMENT
10
Let me push this a little further. Philosophy places question marks around tragedy (it is mimetic, it plays on the emotions and does not adequately engage rationality); the tragic places question marks around philosophy (with Nietzsche, that philosophy is a hostility to life, a facile and empty optimism); but it is also necessary to question tragedy. Why tragedy? Is the tragic an adequate category for thinking about the nature of contemporary conflicts, and their cycles of revenge, violence and claims to justice and state legitimacy? Was 9/11 a tragedy? Is the Israel/Palestine conflict tragic? Iraq? Afghanistan? The list goes on. What is the nature of the tragic and what is questionable in its constant invocation in the contemporary world? What is the availability of the tragic for us, as an aesthetic genre, a mode of experience and a critique of the present? Are we perhaps approaching the limits of the tragic? Is this perhaps the secret intent of Clodagh Emoe’s Parodos? A passage, a passing, an approach, essentially a side entrance to some other space?
Clodagh Emoe, Parodos, 2009,Video with sound, 7 min, looping (stills)
12/13
List of Works Clodagh Emoe 1. Azimuth, 2009 Wood, cloth, ink, 4m × 2.2m × 2.2m 2. Parodos, 2009 Video with sound, 7 min, looping 3. The Approach, 2009 Cloth, scent, 4.2m × 2.3m
14/15
Clodagh Emoe, Parodos, 2009, production image. Photography: Sean Breithaupt
Biographies Central to Clodagh Emoe’s art practice is a concern with the encounter as a condition of art and how it manifests through perception. Her most recent works are best described as events as they are predicated on a gathering and call people together to specific locations at specific times. Through staging and particular methods of assembly her work seeks to create temporalities that are “other” to the quotidian on the experiential and symbolic level to explore how thinking may be ‘felt’. Commissioned projects and solo exhibitions include: Ho Nyn Kairo (The Time of Now), Serpentine Gallery, London, 2016; The Plurality of Existence in the Infinite Amount of Space and Time, VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow, 2016; We Are and Are Not, The Model Niland, 2015; The Things We See, Taipei Biennial, 2014; An Exercise in Seeing, Red Cross Forest, Co. Wicklow, 2013; Proposition 7, The National Art Studio, The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, 2014; Psychic Sleep and Collective Thought, as part of the Maybe Education programme at dOCUMENTA XIII, 2012; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane and Catalyst Arts, Belfast, 2012/’13; Metaphysical Longings, (2006– ) an ongoing exploration of thought using forms of guided visualization known as psychic sleep; The Closing of Mystical Anarchism/ Sleepwalkers, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin, 2012; The Unveiling, a sitespecific work parodying the failed unveiling of a monumental sculpture for Dublin City Council, 2010; and Mystical Anarchism, in collaboration with Simon Critchley, 2009.
Her works are included in the permanent collections of The Model, Nýló, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Limerick City Gallery of Art, The Anthony Reynolds Gallery, Kilfane Sculpture Garden and The University of the Arts, London. She has received residency awards from The Banff Centre, Canada; Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts, USA; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Sím, Reykjavik; and The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea. Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor at the New School for Social Research. His books include Notes on Suicide, 2015; Memory Theatre, 2014; Bowie, 2014; Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (with Jamieson Webter), 2013; The Faith of the Faithless, 2012; The Mattering of Matter. Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society (with Tom McCarthy), 2012; The Book of Dead Philosophers, 2008; Infinitely Demanding. Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, 2007; Very Little…Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, 1997. He is moderator of ‘The Stone’, a philosophy column in The New York Times, to which he is a frequent contributor.
16/17
Cult of Engagement Clodagh Emoe Published as an edition of Forms of Imagining, a series published by Project Press based on the exhibitions programme of Project Arts Centre, Dublin. Dublin, March 2016 ISBN 978-1-872493-49-7 Editor: Tessa Giblin © The Artist, Writers and Project Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission of the publishers. Text: Tessa Giblin, Simon Critchley Designed in Ireland by WorkGroup Sub-Editor: Kate Heffernan Series Editor: Emer Lynch Cult of Engagement Clodagh Emoe 18 December 2009 – 30 January 2010 Project Arts Centre, Dublin Curator: Tessa Giblin Artistic Director (2009): Willie White Production Manager: Joseph Collins General Manager (2009): Niamh O’Donnell Project Press Project Arts Centre 39 East Essex Street Temple Bar Dublin 2 Ireland + 353 (0)1 881 9613 gallery@projectartscentre.ie www.projectartscentre.ie
Project Arts Centre is supported by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and Dublin City Council. With warm thanks to Clodagh Emoe, Simon Critchley, Mick Wilson GradCAM and Fire Station Artists’ Studios.