VIS 111 / Structures for Art

Section 08 Mon/Wed 4-5.50pm, Mandevile B 115B

www.structuresforart.blogspot.com

TA Hermione Spriggs; hfsprigg@ucsd.edu; VAF studio 273

Office Hours: Monday 3-4pm (or by appointment)

Wednesday, 22 February 2012

Notes from Charles Gaines/ Rafael Nunez: metaphor and metonymy


Charles Gaines

Systems numbers language metaphor metonymy
Conceptual art/ 70s avant-garde background

Poetic: metonym and the sublime.

Metonym in works as art as parameter for critical discourse. Form transcending meaning

Number drawings. Really boring. (to draw). à growth sequences, biological form “it looked like a metaphor”

Irrationality. Walnut tree orchard. 28 trees ontop, as one tree. Plotted numerically. Plotting as ‘numerical effect’ and as utility.

Night Crimes:
Police archives, crime scene, night sky reconstruction of specific place/time

Putting things together so that you feel compelled to feel that they are related. Causal mapping of resonance. Tendency to map, forcing him to think there was a relationship. Illusions of truthfulness. [creation of truthfulness?}

Artist as transcendental genius? Touching the inaccessible? Connection of expressive unconscious and universality. People feeling themselves within believable narrative construction whilst being aware of its artificiality

String theory: to re-sequence words in a text (i.e. ‘Rewriting Fanon’) – arbitrary accumulation of words from consecutive sentences. Nonsense à extraction to make sense. Editing with intention of making meaning, but without specific meaning in mind.

Manifestos as musical score

“What I want people to do is see how the structure informs the subject in order to show how dominant structure is in not only our perception of anything, but also in the acquisition of meaning. … It si possible for the structure to advance if there is a disruption in the casue and effect relationship in the representation: that is, the audience is aware of the effect but is uncertain of its cause” à questioning the structure of representation. Negative dialectics (Theador Adorno)

Rafael Nunez (cognitive scientist, UCSD centre of bodily cognition).

Metonymy/ metaphor in the everyday. Recruiting terms/notions from another realm. Temporal events positioned around the body.
Why is future frontal? (looking at metaphor in ‘low level sense’
“helping residents today remember tomorrows yesterdays”

Lang. in Andes: past is infront.

metaphor/metonymy: part stands for whole.

Fictive Motion: ‘the fence stops right after the tree’. Motion attributed to static things as characteristic.

PZ neurons – respond to tactile and visual stimuli: visual stimuli near the face, tactile stimuli on the face.
‘Christmas is approaching’…  neurally ‘see’ the approach, even in pitch black.

Human imagination
-       multi-modal and embodied
-       largely unconscious
-       culturally shaped
-       can be studied empirically
-       ultimately is not fully formalizable mathematically
-       organic, non-mechanistic
-       reflects the type of animals we are.

 Metaphor in Greek philosophy used as evidence of transcendental force, rather than culturally determined. Charles critical of this , cognitive linguistics good ammunition for him there.  Art theory using metaphor as barrier so socio-cultural engagement with art. Transcendentalist, universalist appeal of said theorists.

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