Installation photographs of Uncertain Spectator by Kris Qua
Marie Sester, Fear, 2010 in the Lobby
Susanna Hertrich, Reality Checking Device, 2008 on the Mezzanine
Claire Fontaine, Change, 2006 on the Mezzanine
Tue Greenfort, Die Dynamic der Autoren, 2000 on the Mezzanine
Kate Gilmore, Main Squeeze, 2006 on the Mezzanine
A few installation photographs of Uncertain Spectator by Kris Qua:
Graciela Carnevale, Action for the Experimental Art Cycle, 1968 on the Mezzanine
Anthony Discenza, A Leave-Taking, 2010 commissioned take away poster on the Mezzanine
Jesper Just, A Vicious Undertow, 2007 in the Video Gallery
SUPERFLEX, The Financial Crisis (Sessions I - IV) and Lost Money, 2009 in Studio 1
Jordan Wolfson, Con Leche, 2009 in Studio Beta
More installation photos arriving later this week!
A selection of photographs from the Uncertain Spectator opening on November 18, 2010 with a performance by the Troy Chainsaw Ensemble (Jack Magai, Andrew Lynn & Bobby Gibbs, conducted by Sam Sowyrda). Photographs by Travis Cano (November 2010, canot@rpi.edu).
Mezzanine at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC)
Tue Greenfort’s Die Dynamik der Autoren (2000)
Graciela Carnevale’s photographs and statement from her contribution to the Experimental Art Cycle in Rosario, Argentina (1968) in the foreground and Susanna Hertrich’s Reality Checking Device (2008) in the background.
Graciela Carnevale’s photographs and statement from her contribution to the Experimental Art Cycle in Rosario, Argentina (1968).
Sam Sowyrda conducting for the Troy Chainsaw Ensemble
Performance by the Troy Chainsaw Ensemble (Andrew Lynn, Jack Magai, & Bobby Gibbs)
A illuminating animation by RSA Animate in which David Harvey, a leading social theorist, traces geographical movement of the financial crisis and asks whether there might be a better system than capitalism.
- Emily Zimmerman, Assistant Curator
The French philosopher Jacques Derrida has reflected on the Greek word ‘pharmakon’, which appears in Plato’s dialogues. The pharmakon can be either a poison or a cure. Like our English word ‘drug’, it expresses a fundamental ambivalence: drugs can be life-threatening or life-saving. The hemlock that Socrates drinks when he is put to death exemplifies this dual quality, for it is a poison that kills him but in doing so cures him of life, releasing him from bondage to the body and allowing his soul to return to the eternal truths it loves.
In Kierkegaard’s philosophy, anxiety shares with Plato’s pharmakon this ambivalence. It is both a poisoned chalice and a saving cup. Even more paradoxically, anxiety is the cure for its own suffering. Anxiety can save us from ourselves. When Martin Heidegger quotes Hölderlin in writing – this time of modern technology – that ‘Where the danger lies, there the saving power also grows’, he echoes this Kierkegaardian interpretation of anxiety.
This is why ‘learning to be anxious,’ as Kierkegaard puts it, is such a potent process. The person who confronts his anxiety, perhaps through an encounter with himself, touches a ‘saving power’ within himself:
‘Then the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that he flees from them. For him, anxiety becomes a serving spirit that against its will leads him where he wishes to go. Then, when it announces itself, when it cunningly pretends to have invented a new instrument of torture, far more terrible than anything before, he does not shrink back, and still less does he attempt to hold it off with noise and confusion; but he bids it welcome, greets it festively, and like Socrates who raised the poisoned cup, he shuts himself up with it and says as the patient would say to the surgeon when the painful operation is about to begin: Now I am ready. Then anxiety enters his soul and searches out everything and anxiously torments everything finite and petty out of him, and then it leads him where he wants to go.’
Here, anxiety is depicted as a soul-searching, soul-purifying, soul-saving pharmakon. We might not know whether we have souls, how to find them, or even what it means to speak of the soul. This is part of anxiety’s uncertainty. But it is also part of the search that anxiety carries out.
Derrida thinks that the ambiguity and ambivalence of the pharmakon is always undecidable, essentially uncertain. In anxiety, search and uncertainty correspond to one another. For Kierkegaard, this uncertain search is where faith begins, and probably where it always remains. The adventure of anxiety is the journey of the soul.
- Clare Carlisle
On the question of anxiety, as on other questions, Kierkegaard inclines towards the paradoxical. Although anxiety is a problem for us, the solution is not to stop the anxiety, but to be anxious. At the end of The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard writes:
‘In one of Grimm’s fairy tales there is a story of a young man who goes in search of adventure in order to learn what it is to be in anxiety… This is an adventure that every human being must go through—to learn to be anxious in order that he may not perish either by never having been in anxiety or by succumbing in anxiety. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.’
What is the right way to be anxious? And how can we learn it?
In the state of anxiety, we do not want to be who we are, where we are, how we are. In anxiety, we do not want to be at all. We try to deny or suppress our experience of anxiety, or else we run away from ourselves and from our anxiety. This can be done with the help of alcohol, drugs (legal or illegal), cigarettes, distraction, neurosis, or various illusions of security.
The alternative to this conditioned response of fight or flight is to be anxious: to remain in anxiety, to exist within it, to feel it fully without railing against it or seeking an escape route. In this way, the human being becomes acquainted with herself, perhaps for the first time. It’s like standing outside in a storm, feeling the rain soak through to the skin, listening to the thunder, watching the lightening flash without blinking.
Learning to be anxious in this way requires two things: courage and practice. For Kierkegaard, courage is as important a spiritual virtue as humility – in fact it is probably more important. Practicing courage in the face of anxiety can take many forms. As a Christian, Kierkegaard regarded prayer as the spiritual battlefield on which anxiety is confronted. In prayer, the struggle with anxiety uses the weapons of stillness and silence, and in other religious traditions there are practices, such as meditation, that confront anxiety in similar ways.
Likewise, Uncertain Spectator is a terrain for the confrontation with anxiety. It both stages the artists’ anxious encounters, and invites others to explore their inner experiences of spiritual flight or fight.
- Clare Carlisle
