Bruno Besana : In excess of nothing - destruction, voidance and intensification
Channel: pmilat
Date: 2016-06-22

** MaMa, Zagreb / May 28, 2016 **

A change of sign seems to affect the idea of destruction in thought as well as in art practice in the 20th century: destruction is not only no longer rejected as sheer senseless violence, but is also no longer simply considered as the negative pars destruens,  making room for the new to come. From Matta-Clark’s or Rachel Whiteread’s collapsing structures to Ulay’s disappearing photos, passing through Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin or Malevich’s demand to let all paintings of Russia burn, the notion appears that the contemplation of ashes and ruins might be fertile ground in which new ideas and forms can appear, and thus that a collapsing structure can in itself present a new shape and a new story telling something in an unprecedented manner.
 
Besana investigates how several topical moments in the art of the 20th and 21st centuries have cut straight to the core of a problem that at the same time tormented politics and philosophy: how to produce a novelty freed from any dialectical relation with that which this novelty is itself set to overcome – or, in other words, how to bypass the deadlock of the negative. By focussing on several examples – from the films of Jia Zhang-Ke to contemporary noise music – in which a process of destruction is identical to the construction of the new, Besana delineates how such a constructivity of destruction can be obtained by different strategies of  voidance  and  intensification. From Dieter Roth’s accumulation of objects and symbols, combined with a constant process of rotting, to John Cage’s usage of silence as a  Kampfplatz  where conflicting noises come to reconfigure the space of music, art appears to echo and to articulate  differently  the double attempts of politics and philosophy to intensify contradictions towards an explosive point and to produce the new by suspending or erasing any relation with given modes of representation.
 
This talk was given in the frame of a larger project, entitled Fiat Vacuum, on the history of the figure of the void in XX century,  which Ozren Pupovac and Besana are currently conducting  in the guise of different seminars, conferences and workshops at several European institutions.
 
Bruno Besana taught philosophy at Paris VIII and Bard College, Berlin. He is the author of several articles on contemporary philosophy – namely on the thought of Jacques Rancière, Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou, as well as a translator from French and English into Italian. He is an alumnus of the ICI Kulturlabor Berlin and of the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, and a founding member of the Versus Laboratory collective.

http://mi2.hr/en/2016/05/bruno-besana-visak-nicega-destrukcija-ispraznjenje-i-intenziviranje/