Facies totius universi: an artwork in dispute
(2016) International Festival of Philosophy — Location: Ischia (30.September.2016)
Files
No attached file found for this publication.
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- Our talk aims at dealing with the violent confrontation that happened in Italy as well as in France on the occasion of the performance of Romeo Castellucci's "Sul concetto di volto nel figlio di Dio". While the piece questioned (without rejecting it) the strength of faith and the very idea of incarnation, some religious groups, lead in France by the famous association "Civitas", interrupted the performance and put its two actors in danger. Instead of enacting again the old and somehow sterile battle between conservative christians on the one hand and of openminded amateurs of contemporary art on the other, we question the peculiar modalities of discourse on a work of art. More specifically, the central place of faciality in this show puts us on track of what Deleuze and Guattari conceptualised in "A Thousand Plateaus" as "regimes of signs". This notion of regime accounts of how our perception, thought and speech are partitioned, hence making some discourses incompatible with each other. Henceforth, this performance, and the specific regime of signs that surrounds the ubiquitous "face" on stage, puts us on track for formulating in other terms the topics of blasphemy, scandal and provocation, so frequently used in democtratic societies when artworks in general are submitted to criticism, attack or censorship. The questions we address are thus simple: Does a work of art dictate its own ways of being interpreted? What happens in this case for Castellucci, who puts the very idea of representation in crisis? And in the final analysis, how does the mechanism of persuasion and argumetation work when the incomprehension at stake deals with an aesthetic object, where all our senses are put to their limits, and where our minds are consecutively thrown into panic?
- Affiliations
Citations
Lebedev, O. (2016). Facies totius universi: an artwork in dispute. International Festival of Philosophy, Ischia. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/184921