in the light of our times

 

The self of the sun, of light, is, we would say, that it cannot be known in terms of its self. "And this means equally that the sun is always non-familiarly known and therefore literally unnamed ...
However, from this point of view, the sun is the perceived object par excellence."

 

In this passage from Derrida, taking its starting-point from Aristotle's Topics, we read about the sun (hellenic: ilios); the sun which represents for us what we call 'a perceived model per excellence';
the sun which is always non-familiarly known and therefore literally unnamed, namely, that which, as we tend to appropriate it, is already an image in motion, being displaced towards the region
of the non-familiarly new, beyond the myth or the principle which produced it ... However, in what way are these displacements produced in contemporary art?

 

 

 

My intention is not only to render the myth sub specie temporis nostri [in the light of our own times] but also to allow each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected
and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole) to condition and even to create its own technique, Joyce wrote to his friend the publisher Carlo Linati to describe the way in which he wanted to
transpose the Homeric myth in Ulysses. From one point of view, perhaps the whole of today's artistic production could be regarded as structuring on the re-registrations and the alterations of myth; 
where the myth is considered to be ¡absent¢, ¡ended¢ or its inherital framework is not clear, its variations, rejections and re-combinations  are re-inscribed.

It is interesting to watch the way in which special techniques constitute a system or language; probably this is the way to answer the question of 'which technique' is appropriate in each artistic requirement.

 

Perhaps even the individual techniques or artistic practices (here the video) - precisely those which today tend to be regarded as having achieved an autonomy from the framework, the 'producing body' from
which they emanate- constitute an unknown species which we should examine for their content only; thus it is not a matter chiefly of a special technique or a qualitative relation concerning us in the specific
works which we are studying (digital instead of analogue, processed instead of unelaborated, continuous instead of discontinuous), but their dynamics through time, and, more particularly, in today's frame
of reference. But nor should this be regarded as established, since we cannot accept the existence of an aggregate  critical theory ...

Nevertheless, the works produce, simultaneously with their appearance in the light, the framework of their life in time, the counterweight of the reaction which they will provoke; our interest focuses on that
point where, while we attempt to examine them, time, in a certain way, stops. Inevitably, either they will pass, assimilated, into the region of the ¡familiar¢, or as known, non-familiar works they will pass
beyond the 'corporeal' and aesthetic framework which produced them to be re-examined in the future, in the light of that time ...

 

Yiannis Melanitis

Visual artist , melanitis@hotmail.com