How do you teach something no one can see? And if you can’t see it, how do you know if it’s any good?
Burgoyne, Greig (2023) How do you teach something no one can see? And if you can’t see it, how do you know if it’s any good? In: On Not Knowing: How Artists Teach Conference, 9-10 June 2023, Glasgow School of Art. (Unpublished)
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This proposal starts from the premise that art is an event of materiality, not simply an object of matter, but a phenomenological field no less of absence and withdrawal, from place, of actions - in effect, resulting in a site that is estranged from all forms, for makers and viewers, students, and teachers alike. We will discuss this in a two part overview of this paradox of materiality between the physical, intimate, and sensed and material forming's of the virtual, distant and visual.
It applies key contexts that propose artworks being indicative of elements and not productions of ‘things’ (Merleau-Ponty/Levinas). The concept of clearing as a means in which materials of making are absorbed in the realisation of the work as it discloses an ontology of site beyond exteriority and aesthetic appearance (Heidegger); An intersubjectivity that emerges where upon ‘the visible is pregnant with the invisible’ (Merleau-Ponty) and in contrast to the functionality of material (Heidegger) memory makes the past available to me for my future (Levinas) through that exchange of expression and feeling (Dufrenne).
Hence the knowledge we bring to a subject, and the experience of the invisible (art) as one in which we co-create between a pre-reflective situation of art’s raw facticity, and the application of artistic languages, processes, and methodologies as the means in which it may be concealing that reciprocity.
Discussing and teaching art may be a paradoxical phenomenon, being as it is between visuality, the physical and the mental. As such evolving at an interspace between past and future that is present through its dispersal, indeed as Levinas suggests this ‘non representability is the surplus of the lived body over the representation of it.’ (2015:43)
This presentation will unpack the paradoxical nature of making, its comprehension, and teaching. In this, erasure and concealment are in fact the means to reveal that concealment inherent within art-working and making, as one set of assemblage unforms and another emerges in that reterritorialization and future forming.
In doing so reflect the value and challenges of agency, the paradoxical means to radiate meaning and illuminate sensing by the very concealment inherent within that material process, and the resulting potential of these distinct phenomena of the sensorial yet invisible, and the seen yet distant.
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