Description
In spring 2007, John Crews, an Operations Manager at the Progressive, Cleveland, died in a high-rise condominium when a fire broke out. The company asked artist T. R. Ericsson, known for works such as Waiting II (2007) which consists of layers of smoke applied to paper, to create a memorial work. While researching Crews’ life, Ericsson came across an inflated toy that Crews had purchased in jest to decorate his office. Ericsson transferred the breath from the balloon to an air-tight glass vessel by means of a specially designed fitting that allowed the vessel to be filled with water in such a way that the air released into the glass displaced the water coming out. Crews’ breath thus became a ready-made.Tracing the use of breath in contemporary artistic practices, this paper interrogates their counter-cultural working with the aid of Bachelardian and Irigarayan respective conceptualisations of air and Lefevbre’s notion of the festive instant as related to breath and in-spiration. It places contemporary breath-based works in dialogue with the history of automation (understood in both senses of the word, as invariant repetition and as that which happens all by itself) in order to ponder the relation of breath, the chief signifier of the spirit (in many languages the two concepts come in dyadic combinations, e.g. nefs and rush in Arabic, atman and prana in Sanskrit, pneuma and psyche in Greek, animus and spiritus in Latin) and contemporary AI elaborations on ready-mades.
| Period | 20 Jun 2023 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Respiratory Philosophy: A Paradigm Shift |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Portorož, SloveniaShow on map |