TextuRality

Tanggal 30 Mei - 02 Juni ini, Tamkang University, Taipei, menjadi host untuk conference International Deleuze Studies. Ini link untuk acara tersebut. Saya akan mempresentasikan sebuah paper mengenai praktek Ardi Gunawan (lihat blognya). 

Ini abstraknya, dalam bahasa Inggris:

Textu(r)ality: 

Thinking beyond the Text with Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty.

This paper will discuss Deleuze’s notion of “assemblage” in the context of Indonesian contemporary art practice, in particular works by Ardi Gunawan. Although this area has recently been subject to substantial academic study (Turner, 2008; Mashadi, 2006), none have approached it from a Deleuzian perspective. This is related to the tendency of much of art history and theory of the last three decades, which are characterized by the “linguistic turn” stimulated primarily by Derrida (1976, 1978) and de Man (1979, 1983). In a nutshell, this perspective holds that all phenomena, including art practices – its production and discourse – must be read and interpreted as a text. As an outcome, it overlooks that we experience the world not as texts to be deciphered and conceptualized through the acts of reading and writing, but first and foremost as corporeal, tangible phenomena that we register through and with the “psycho-physical” aspects of the body (Casey, 1997).

Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty offer a way to think beyond textuality by turning instead to the embodied engagement we have with events and objects in the world. Both, I argue, shift the theoretical focus from “experience-as-text” by calling attention to the “textures” of embodied experience. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body is especially instructive in its argument that embodied perception remains a unique source of meaning (2003). Deleuze takes Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical project of the body further by focusing on the notions of movements and flows, of “material and forces” that produce “assemblages” (1995, 2004).

The aesthetic model provided by Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty is particularly relevant in a discussion about contemporary art practices that negotiate the limits of sculpture and performance. Here, I will discuss the work of a contemporary Indonesian artist, Ardi Gunawan, in order to illustrate my claim. Contemporary art in Indonesia is a thriving area of study and in this paper I aim to add to existing research by discussing the experience of Gunawan’s works in terms of spatio-temporal “assemblages”.