For this third seminar we will concentrate on the figure of the Fugitive. This will lead to questions of underground culture and secrecy, and how disappearance and hiding are often driven by the need or desire to run away. In this regard, the Fugitive crafts a range of methods, allowing us to delve deeper into what we can call “the art of escape.” While the Monster led us to questions of form and formlessness, the clean and the dirty, the Fugitive forces an encounter with absence and the negative: how fugitivity is always forming the basis for a poetics of invisibility and survival. We’ll follow these topics through a number of artists whose works search for ways to express absence, or perform forms of escape, including Lui Bolin, Bracha Ettinger, Bas Jan Ader, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Theaster Gates. Through their works we’ll deepen a view onto the poetics of the missing.
Bibliography:
Camiel van Winkel, The Regime of Visibility
Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation
Stefano Harvey and Fred Moten, Undercommons
Junichiro Tanazaki, In Praise of Shadows
Bracha Ettinger, Art as Compassion