Liz Allan
SYNOPSIS
Georges Didi-Huberman 'The Supposition of the Aura: The Now, the Then, and Modernity'. First published in Negotiating rapture: the Power of Art to Transform Lives (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Following Benjamin's understanding of the aura as decline and re-inflection, Didi-Huberman's essay presents a hypothesis that the aura is present in the viewer's experience of modernist art as 'supposition'. Outlining the nuances across Benjamin's writings on the aura he considers key moments of its development as "that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance" and which is distinguished as "not the source" but a "dynamic 2 way flow of a historicity that asks to be recognised as a restoration, a restitution, and as something that by that very fact is uncompleted, always open". By contrast, supposition, Didi-Huberman explains, is the act of "placing below" and "means producing a hypothesis - also 'underneath' - which then becomes capable of offering not only the principle 'subject' of a work of art, but also its deepest 'principle'". Critiquing Panofsky's restorative reading of the return of iconography in abstract modernist works ("Newman was not a Kabbalist"), Didi-Huberman instead proposes that an articulation between two paradigms must be sought in every work of art, that of: "formal singularities and anthropological paradigms". This articulation leads to Huberman's question of process and a discussion of dialectics: how a painting supposes, and how it acts on the viewer's gaze.
WHAT THE
1. At a craft market stall a sign advertises 'While You Wait' illustrations of: "Tales, Yarns, Gossip, Folklore and Histories… of… Rebellion, Impropriety, Transgressions, and Miscreance... etc." I wait, greet people, sit, actively listen, illustrate on paper and also record on audio tape those tales of passers-by who stop in. We sit either side of a cloth-covered card table. Lying on the table is drawing and recording equipment. Sometimes a small crowd gathers. When the passers-by finish recounting their tales I wrap and seal my illustration for them in brown paper. The illustrations are rudimentary, like visual note taking. I keep carbon copies to pin on a board which is fixed to the back of the stall above a bench. At the bench people can sit and listen to the audio recordings. Over four weekends and as part of a Public Art Biennale in Christchurch, NZ, Tales Illustrated accumulates 50 or so stories.
2.
A commercially hand painted billboard at the entrance to the gallery's building advertises 'Visible Mending' by Garment Repair Services, directing people to the second floor. Within the building and climbing the stairwell, two pointing-finger signs further direct people upwards to the gallery. Here they encounter one of six visible menders ready to barter their services across the faux wood surface of a counter top. Behind the mender stands a small false wall, papered in seventies wallpaper, a facade reminiscent of a stage prop. On it a shelf holding a pot plant, clock, vintage mending tools, and mending in-progress. Menders have requisite needlework skills, including my mother and I. Gallery visitors bring garments to be visibly mended. The bartered transactions include cardboard boxes, a mixed-tape, a puppet show and heirloom recipes. Menders receive their negotiated exchange and gallery visitors receive their garments, mended visibly in the style of the mender they encountered and bartered with.
3.
A cacophony of original and found imagery is melded with digital and photographic montage techniques across three 2.4m x 3m billboards, displaying the latest work of a collective of four artists. On the first billboard fireworks explode in circular bursts, foregrounded by a scene bordered in hazard tape. Within, a pile of strewn clothing and a layered digitally-degraded image of a woman opens curtains to reveal more hazard-pattern. Billboard two contains a cropped photograph of a naked woman's upper torso, her breasts obscured by a pair of hypnotic swirl-filled a-ok hand gestures made with purple fingers. 'The Gayze Off(TM)' is overlaid like a digital watermark, an extra Z in fluro green scrawl produces The Gayze'z' Off(TM). A matching fluro green lipstick lies in the foreground of the third billboard. Behind it, a shell-like cut out of black, windswept hair is semi obscuring an upside down image of a group of five women.