306 - The Search for Participation in Contemporary Art
The Symbolic World
Jonathan Pageau
4.8 • 933 Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2023
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this lecture, I take you through contemporary art history and its desperate search for a proper means of participation in a desacralized world. This talk is a follow-up to a previous video I did, The End of Desacralization in Art. This time I want to explore with you some specifics on how contemporary art has to confront alienation, power dynamics, and the minimization of yet yearning for ritual, participation, and community.
Original YouTube version of this lecture: https://youtu.be/EWc7TKm9jho
This lecture follows up on a previous video lecture I posted, The End of Desacralization in Art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WYh20sYBsQ&t=813s
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Timestamps:
0:00 - Preview
0:59 - Intro music
1:24 - Introduction
2:27 - The pendulum swing of deincarnation
3:12 - Brancusi: Find the essence
5:41 - More examples: Kandinsky and Mondrian
8:59 - Opposites attract: Idealism and constructivism
12:38 - Alienation of the art object
17:53 - One extreme calls the other
19:10 - Remember participation
21:12 - Marina Abramovic
28:56 - Resembling rituals
31:55 - Eating as ritual participation
36:37 - Joseph Beuys: Atonement
43:51 - Anselm Kiefer: The weight of history
47:02 - Trapped in the art world
50:55 - Hope
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My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's not surprising that this is what she's doing. |
| 0:04.0 | And you can understand that in some ways what she was doing in the 1970s and what she was doing |
| 0:09.0 | back then is what would lead to things like cutting and self-harm in the modern world. |
| 0:14.0 | Because cutting and self-harm is also a desire to participate. |
| 0:19.0 | It's a desire to re-engage the world, right? To reawaken our engagement |
| 0:24.0 | with the world. It's just a very deluded and deranged version, which enters into this |
| 0:30.3 | sadomasochistic paradigm that appears at the beginning of the modern age, right? It's like, |
| 0:35.7 | all I can understand the world to be |
| 0:38.9 | is either a world of power in which I, you know, |
| 0:42.7 | inflict pain and violence and torture, |
| 0:45.7 | or I am the recipient of violence and pain and torture. |
| 0:49.0 | And if I can do that to myself, |
| 0:51.5 | then I am in, like, in control of the nihilism that I meanism that I'm living in, of the kind of dark world that I'm engaged with. |
| 1:00.0 | This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. |
| 1:13.6 | Hello to all of you. welcome to the symbolic world. |
| 1:28.3 | Today we're going to talk about art. |
| 1:30.3 | I was really surprised to notice how many people watch my video on El Greco and Andy Warhol. |
| 1:37.3 | So I thought we will push it a little further and we'll look at contemporary artists like Marina Brownwich of Pizza Gate fame and a few other |
| 1:47.0 | contemporary artists. And we'll look at how much of contemporary art or some contemporary art |
| 1:51.9 | is yearning for participation. We'll look at how they come close to it and also how they struggle |
| 1:58.0 | to break through. And so as you notice, a lot of things have been going on in the symbolic world. |
| 2:03.8 | We have a new website that you can sign up to. |
... |
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