OBSCURANTISM OF FACTS LECTURE 15TH JANUARY 2011 NYLO - LIVING ART MUSEUM, REYKJAVIK, ICELAND
NYLO - Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland
Exhibition: Marcellvs L., 0667 0778 3195 1716
Exhibition: Marcellvs L., 0667 0778 3195 1716
Art is the opening up toward incommensurability. Its aim is forever to render the incommensurable commensurable, to lend form to the formless; and that makes art a paradoxical praxis. The resistance art offers to the commensurable has nothing to do with escapism. Rather, it seeks to define the relation to reality (to what already exists) with greater precision by being resistant to it, an act that helps the subject make contact with what marks reality’s boundary and its inconsistency. The demystification of the world has led to the mystification of the demystified reality. Enlightenment has engendered its own obscurantism. Facts are the new religion. Facts are essentially consistent and reliable. That is the meaning of the word and its function: to ensure familiarity. The opening toward the incommensurable, by contrast, is an opening toward unfamiliarity as a value of the world, an opening toward its inconsistency, which encompasses its contingency and its becoming, its invisibility and its slippage, its indisponibility and its insignificance.