The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is central to Ettinger's work, she posits a distinction between an 'Orphic' and a 'Matrixial' gaze in the art-viewing experience: as we look back (in time), like Orpheus looked behind him in the myth, we consign Eurydice (the viewed subject) to objectivity, abandoned at the mouth of Hell. Ettinger's series entitled 'Eurydice' (1994-8) uses photographs (sometimes of her mother, for example as a young woman in Lodz in 1937-8), which she photocopies, interrupting the copying process so the photocopic dust does not fix to the paper. Crucial to her theory (the bit I forgot) of ''reconnaissance'', a word which the artist splits up into its constituent parts (re-co-naissance), a 'co-re-birthing' of subjectivity, Ettinger then uses tiny horizontal brush strokes of coloured paint to 'join up' the gaps in the dust, to build a a membrane between the image looking out, and the gaze of the viewer. Pollock says it better: "colour in its vibration creates space, and the space it creates becomes an affective threshold that reaches out to embrace the viewer in a thickening of what lies between viewer and image, now and then/m, that binds seer and seen, world and subject, image and psyche.''
The Matrixial gaze (as an alternative to the Orphic aggression of looking as possessing), is an idea which is linked to Levinas' idea of 'matrixial painting', and to say it with Pollock once again, it is related to a way of looking in which "our unsighted eyes become what she [Ettinger] calls 'erotic aerials' of the psyche.''
If I'm clever enough I'll post some images from the Eurydice series, so get your Matrixial glasses at the ready...
4 comments:
hello helen,
blanchot's analysis of the gaze of orpheus in his book 'the space of literature' is quite famous. here are the first two paragraphs of the relevant chapter:
"When Orpheus descends toward Eurydice, art is the power by which night opens. Because of art's strength, night welcomes him; it becomes welcoming intimacy, the harmony and accord of the first night. But it is toward Eurydice that Orpheus has descended. For him Eurydice is the furthest that art can reach. Under a name that hides her and a veil that covers her, she is the profoundly obscure point toward which art and desire, death and night, seem to tend. She is the instant when the essence of night approaches as the other night.
"However, Orpheus's work does not consist in ensuring this point's approach by descending into the depths. His work is to bring it back to the light of day and to give it form, shape, and reality in the day. Orpheus is capable of everything, except of looking this point in the face, except of looking at the center of night in the night. He can descend toward it; he can -- and this is still stronger an ability -- draw it to him and lead it with him upward, but only by turning away from it. This turning away is the only way it can be approached. This is what concealment means when it reveals itself in the night. But Orpheus, in the movement of his migration, forgets the work he is to achieve, and he forgets it necessarily, for the ultimate demand which his movement makes is not that there be a work, but that someone face this point, grasp its essence, grasp it where it appears, where it is essential and essentially appearance: at the heart of night."
Hey Helen and Burhan,
I recently bought the Matrixial Borderspace and now I wish I hadn´t left it in New York. The little rumors I have heard told about Bracha´s theory is that an opening of multiplied occurrence happens at once within a space of subjects. It sounded a bit 'out there' in the best of ways. Blanchot works with the Orphic/Eurydic myth as well in his Awaiting Oblivion, where a he cannot seem to get a she to hear him, though when he is not concerned really with her hearing him, she notes that she already has. I do think that Blanchot suffers from a misogyny here, an orientation that might also surface in his support for the Vichey regime, a reality that seem burried the first day of class with mention of his heroics. Blanchot constantly puts the feminine in the position of the muse or the artwork, and it might be interesting to ask whether the inaccessibility he is always so frustrated by, or so happy to be seduced by, is little more than a sublimation of heteromasculine libidinal frustrations. The sinking back from a philosophy of concepts into one that finds poetry and fiction an outlet, a helpful way to proclaim exteriority, the outside. Yes, the outside would be outside everything, given of course that something within reveals its contours. In that sense Derrida´s crypt seems more accurate as regards the psyche of a secular being. The exterior could easily become something like the gnosis of a negative theology. Where all material, all thought, all present is deemed bad, and beyond the angels or hierarchs of god, is god, the nothingness which is actually pure.
the thing about blanchot’s support for the collaborationist regime is actually not true. in fact, the hard evidence shows otherwise. the misunderstanding came from the fact that two magazines edited by him went pro-vichy later. but he had quit the writing team long before that and – according to the letters that were only published after his death – because he disagreed with the anti-semitism of his new bosses. it is ambiguous which parts of 'the instant of my death' actually happened since it is not really an autobiographical testimony. still, according to christophe bident's biography, blanchot, like sartre & camus, participated in the french resistance against the nazis. he helped hid many resistance fighters & jews during the war, including the family of levinas, his best friend. what troubles scholars now is actually blanchot's early years before the war as a political journalist with french ultra-nationalist leanings.
on blanchot’s ‘libidinal frustrations’: this is something i myself have asked before. it seems that the females in his narratives often assume this tragic & virginal madonna ‘stereotype’. like levinas, blanchot has sometimes been accused of 'other-ing' the feminine. his romantic life is not well-documented (although there was this affair with one of bataille's lovers). on the other hand, we could say that this 'frustration’ & 'inaccessibility' simply points to the general & ethical frustration regarding the impossibility of appropriating the Other (any kind of Other) which, in turn, points to the impossibility of language, art & inspiration itself.
i would argue that the blanchotian Outside and the derridean Crypt are two sides of the same coin: the Crypt is so interior, so hidden, that it is exterior; the Outside is so exterior that it is interior. they both speak of a mutual enfolding between an infinite interiority and an infinite exteriority. blanchot writes that we should avoid understand the Outside as some kind of possibly divine or mystical ‘beyond’ that is inaccessible. since the Outside 'deconstructs' the immanence/transcendence opposition, then it should not be associated with God, at least God conceived as a total transcendence, beyond the material and beyond presence. (this is the 'step not beyond' that tom mentioned.) i guess that is why Blanchot later preferred the term 'le neutre' instead, which avoids these spatial and possibly gnostic connotations.
Thanks Burhan,
I received my information from a source I should have known was not to be trusted. I.E. A person.
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