Sunday, April 09, 2006

On the nature of corridor and organ



Language seems a privileged metaphor for expressing the mediated character of art-making and the art-work. On the one hand, speech is both an immaterial medium (compared with, say, images) and a human activity with an apparently essential stake in the project of transcendence, of moving beyond the singular and contingent (all words being abstractions, only roughly based on or making reference to concrete particulars).

This dual character of language — its, abstractness, and its "fallenness" in history — can serve as a microcosm of the unhappy character of the arts today; Thus, Sam Renseiw recorded a short cantata, performed in a corridor in Helsinki's Swedish theatre, near the internal cantina. Listen and view by clicking here or enter the corridor above (patafilm 133, 02'04'', 4.5 MB, mov/quicktime)