Konfrontacje i negocjacje : strategie tożsamości we współczesnych praktykach artystycznych

Abstract

Confrontations and negotiations. Strategies of identity in contemporary artistic practices is a research work aimed at rethinking the anthropology of identity and its imaging in the world of contemporary art. The starting point for this is in the aesthetical and philosophical reflection on history and theory of the functioning of the subject in contemporary culture, and especially contemporary art. Identity and subjectivity are always confronted with what’s public and what’s private. In such understanding they are characterized by ambiguity, common bloodstream and direct connection between the ideas of the Inside and the Outside, the common and archaeological discourse of what got an important development – in wider philosophical perspective – in Michel Foucault’s writings. Equally intriguing complements to this reflection can be found in Jacques Derrida’s notes on the presence/absence of trace and subject, Barthes’ Death of the Author and Gilles Deleuze’s ‘bankruptcy of representation’ and ‘loss of identity’. These humanistic tropes and motives are aided by the ‘theses’ included in over 2000 year-old Buddhist sutras and in scientific discoveries in the area of quantum physics, which unanimously undermine the status of an objective observer and the identity and integrity of our image of the world with the reality. The perspective that emerges from them creates a plane for a subjective, relative or quantum participant of events. Therefore it is a symbolic place, where all the participants of the urban spectacle of contemporaneity meet, including flâneurs (and artists) among others. The work presents the analysis and reinterpretation of artistic strategies occurring in art of the last five decades – in the context of the issues of widely understood identity (of artists, works and the viewer). The work includes the outline and model of modernist and postmodernist understanding of identity which became finally relativized in result of changeable paradigms of knowledge. This has caused the impasse of subjectivity and generally viewed identity. The art of the second half of the twentieth century, as well as the newest works reflect this crack of the classical identity discourse, what reveals among other things through (de)mythologizing the genealogical (and biographical) discourse of the artist. Today the identity of all participants of artistic practices (readings and expressions) has become a space of negotiation and linguistic game, where the subject makes transgression, multiplication or dispersion, and the very identity is a figure of nomadic and rhisomatic character. It is shaped in relation to what’s public and private; therefore the metaphors of ‘flâneur’ and ‘passage’, connoting the dialectics of the Inside and the Outside, seem to be cognitively and aesthetically attractive.