No Place for Complacency: The Resistance of Gesture
- Submitting institution
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Leeds Beckett University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 4
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Traversals of Affect: On Jean-François Lyotard
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Academic
- ISBN
- 978-1474257886
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
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- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- How can commentaries on art hope to carry the same affects which prompted the desire to make comment? The return of the ‘same’ may not be possible, yet traces of affect give rise to further commentaries: a gesture that rethinks the possibilities of a performance art archive, as a remobilizing of affect. This chapter is part of an ongoing consideration of how to respond to performance art, furthering the argument that Jean-François Lyotard’s writings on art and philosophy call us to do so.
The challenge is a fear of repetition; turning to a performance by the Chinese-born artist, based in Germany: Yingmei Duan, whose work had already previously provoked the writer to respond in the context of Lyotard’s thought (Continuum, 2012; Ashgate, 2013). The writer describes how, at a performance in a London gallery, space-time-matter is transformed by the artist, in spite of their personal acquaintance and despite personal fears and misgivings. The unanticipated power of gesture leads to a response in kind: the making of a video piece that attempted to link onto that gesture. The art is in the gesture, not the artist or the work: the presence of the remainder is the concern of this chapter. It is an attempt to evoke the complexity of the gesture, which resists and rejects expected articulations, prompting a transference of affect. Accepted forms of communication are broken down and the codified body dismembered, as Lyotard writes in one of the important but scholarly under-examined essays central to this chapter: ‘The body doesn’t belong to you’.
This edited book is the first to highlight questions of affect in the philosophy of J-F Lyotard. Developed by scholars at Emory University, Atlanta, the investigation began through a related conference to which Bamford contributed, in order to articulate Lyotard’s unique contribution to affect theory.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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