Monday 3.29.10 – Informe, Abstraction, Ecstasy: An Evening with Leslie Thornton

CONTENTS:
1. About this Monday
2. Films to be screened
3. texts for this monday
4. About Leslie Thornton
5. About Thomas Zummer
6. About Corrine Fitzpatrick
7. from Corrine to Leslie
8. About this series

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1. About this Monday

What: An Evening with Leslie Thornton
When: Monday 3.29.10
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: 7:30 pm
Who: Free and open to all

Tonight – a supplement to the series Informe, Abstraction, Ecstasy - will feature the work of Leslie Thornton, as a creative dialogue, with the filmmaker, and philosopher Thomas Zummer, present.

The intersections between the lyrical/personal and the political is seen in tonight’s program through the lens of language: discourse (or confession) – potentially a radical, idiosyncratic, and transcendent representation of experience – is figured in Leslie’s work along the full and often strange continuum between the historical/archival and the purely linguistic and abstract – focussing on formations of tone, affect, and aura that language introduces into human experience.

Structured as an open-ended and constantly evolving text, in which history is transfigured - as biological mutation, terminal landscape, children’s game - Leslie’s work is built around notions of the inexpressible and inexpressible experience – this impossibility of expression providing a critical link between visual abstraction and the political that has defined this series.

Thornton’s personal engagement with the history surrounding the atomic bomb is employed here from two angles: Chick Strand’s lyrical portrait of the nature of desire in Soft Fiction commences the evening, in counterpoint with short works by Dennis Oppenheim.

The theme of material transformation (an alchemical theme) is introduced through the work of Oppenheim, and three segments from the Aspen series – Glassed Hand, Leafed Hand, and Fusion: Tooth and Nail. Representing the abstract of desire in the physical and material through Oppenheim’s work localizes this concretely in a quality of sensation, expanding on the theme raised with Strand’s film.

Thornton’s detournement of scientific, military, and archival footage in Let Me Count the Ways provides a ground for material in the show. The issue of legibility figures prominently in her work, with a questioning and analysis of the efficacy of discourses – governmental, historical, personal – to represent cultural memory. This effort to provide a bridge between “documentation” and the ultimate impossibility of representation provides a commentary on the critical linkages between the political and qualities of visual abstraction evoked in the show.

Hollis Frampton’s text Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity will be introduced in dialogue with Thornton’s recent Photography is Easy; qualities of the photographic (the singular, metaphysical moment around which the archive emerges).

Hegel’s text serves to introduce Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit: that resolution only comes after the fact, in retrospect, spinning away from desire’s fundamental impossibility.

Tonight will feature talks by Thornton and by Thomas Zummer, with poetry selections by Corrine Fitzpatrick from the Bowery Poetry Project.

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2. Films to be screened

Chick Strand Soft Fiction [excerpt]

X-TRACTS

Let Me Count the Ways: Minus 10, 9, 8, 7

The Last Time I Saw Ron

Jennifer, Where Are You?

Dennis Oppenheim Aspen Series Works - (Glassed Hand, Leafed Hand, Material Interchange)

Photography is Easy (2010 version)

She Had He So He Do He to Her

All right you guys

Howard

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3. texts

Hollis Frampton, Incisions in History, Segments of Eternity
http://sduk.us/beaver/PDF/frampton11.pdf

Mary Ann Doane, In the Ruins of the Image, The Work of Leslie Thornton
http://sduk.us/beaver/PDF/doane_thornton.pdf

Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History, an Essay on the Destruction of Experience (excerpt page 37-61)
http://sduk.us/beaver/PDF/ga_infancyhistory.pdf

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4. About Leslie Thornton

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/thornton.html

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5. About Thomas Zummer

Thomas Zummer is an artist and lecturer at the Tyler School of Art and a visiting professor in critical studies in the Transmedia Programme at the Hogeschool Sint Lukas, Brussels, as well as visiting professor at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee. As an artist he has exhibited internationally since 1976, including at Exit Art, Thread Waxing Space, and The Dia Foundation in New York City as well as at the CAPC in Bordeaux and Wigmore Hall in London. With his wife, they have had a long collaboration as well with The Wooster Group, acting in many of their performances. Most recently, Zummer was artist in residence at the haudenschildGarage in La Jolla, California.

As an academic, Zummer has been affiliated with many institutions and studied with Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoueur at the University of Toronto, as well as completing studies at Yale University where he studied with Paul de Man. At the University of California, Berkeley, Zummer was research assistant to Michel Foucault. He is currently at work on a book of early reference systems, provisionally entitled Intercessionary Technologies: Archive/Database/Interface.

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6. About Corrine Fitzpatrick

Corrine Fitzpatrick is a poet and is the Program Coordinator of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church.

http://poetryproject.org/

http://puppyflowers.com/11/corrine.html

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7. from Corrine to Leslie

http://sduk.us/beaver/PDF/texts_for_leslie_thornton.pdf

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8. About this series

link to Part I
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/002969.php

link to Part II
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/002999.php

link to Part III
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/003029.php