The Monster Seminar #3: The Gift
I want to come back to the topic of the inanimate, and how objects and things participate in our creative practices: how, in many ways, they come to life through artistic expressions and processes. This is also one of the key expressions of the monster: the animation or ghosting of matter – these things that suddenly come to life.
So the monster can be seen to raise the question of life and of death; it stages a confrontation between the living and the non-living, and maybe in doing so, it challenges how we understand these.
I want us to think further about the living and the dead, and how artistic practices can also be seen to upset this distinction; rather, what we understand as animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, living and non-living, seems to become less clear, less stable. If the monster shows us one thing, it is that life is a force – even, an imagination – that can travel through all matter.