Hubertus von Amelunxen: Lecture 4

Victor Burgin's "Grativa".

The Crypt of the Gaze
1929-1932 Benjamin gave radio lectures for children.
1931-1932 Lectures devoted to past destructions.


Regarding Pompeii:
Past annihilation= present preservation.
Ashes-->plaster-->excavation of the body.

[At Pompeii:
A couple's ashes frozen in the posture of attempting to reach one another.
This remarks the incessant capture of the two lovers attempting to reach for each other. The gesture of attempting through loss caused by natural disaster preserves the despair of never coming to a point of reconciliation. This sense of the "never" is then positioned in a relentless repetition of loss within the very space of the two lovers whose hands and fingers do not join.] The artist Burgin and his collaborator meet at the original site in Pompeii to intuitively "meet" and reconstruct the poetics of seeing and being seen. Both take a separate set of 9 photographs at the same site at different times paired with a panoramic moving-image of the space. At what point does their subject position meet--that's the big fucking useless question people are wondering. At what point does their gaze fall into each others and what does it matter?

"In the light of the current myth, in which art aims to become a "total experience," soliciting total attention. the strategies of impoverishment and reduction indicate the most exalted ambition, art could adopt. Underneath what looks like a strenuous modesty, if not actual debility, one may discern an energetic secular blasphemy: the wish to attain the unfettered, unselective, total consciousness of "God."[...] language is the most impure, the most contaminated, the most exhausted of all the materials out of which art is made. -Sontag, "The Aesthetics of Silence".

Burgin. "Elective Affinities", Weimer, 2000.

"Wherever the eye wanders it has nowhere to go but wall and sky". -Benjamin

"Nihilism embodied the fear against nature." -Georg Simmel

Photography as disaster.

"The disaster ruins everything all the while remaining everything intact." -Maurice Blanchot

What speed was required to see what's behind in the "here".--Genet
(referring to propellers on airplanes when they spin.)

[Language is pure movement while listening.]

[emotional numbers as a way of unifying male and female.]