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The working title of this year’s network meeting is ”Gesture: Matter, Movement and Meaning.” By focusing on the concept of ‘gesture’ we invite a discussion on time and movement as they unfold within the artwork itself as well as in our approach to the artwork. Expressing the tentative, not codified articulation, gesture manifests itself on a pre-reflective level.
Already in antique rhetoric gesture played a key role: speech based itself on a delicate gradation of the voice and gesture (Rhetorica ad Herennium). For long periods of time orators, actors and singers were trained in imitating the postures and gesture of antique pictorial art and in the baroque period music formulated a distinctive ‘doctrine of figures’.
In modern times reflections on gesture and gesticulations play a central role within the thinking of philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, Lyotard, Adorno, Vilém Flusser and Agamben. One key issue is the question if gesture possesses its own logos, (something that cannot be shown or articulated), or if it already is generating signification in the linguistic sense of the word.
Within dance gesture is essential which is one reason why dance by some have been considered to form the very origin of art. Within theatre, bodily gesture as well as speech constitutes the performative act. By the end of the 19th century, however, focus has been put on gesticulation as such. One example is the intimate theater in which ‘that, which cannot be said’ is expressed through gestures and bodily movements. Another example is the epic theater of Brecht. Here social gestures and attitudes are visualized through specific techniques.
Within music we find gesture in notation, in certain figures, in the gesticulations of the musicians as well as in the captivated listeners. Focus put on gesture opens among other things for important perspectives in relation to sound art as well as sound research in general. Here there is a need for the development of a vocabulary to describe sound art and production of sense in general. In verbal art forms gesture is present not only within the rhythm of language and reading, but in punctuation as well.
Within visual art we can pursue the emphatic gesture from the ‘speaking’ antique sculpture, via the medieval ‘demonstratio ad oculos’ to the strokes of Cézanne and further on to the search of links between matter and narration in contemporary painting and the examination of body, time, language and space in performance art. The concept of gesture invokes an investigation of work immanent gesticulations, partly as rhetorical figures, partly as pre-reflective gesticulations of the artist. Furthermore, it makes possible an understanding of gesture as deixis: an appealing pointing out towards the beholder.
If the work of art is a gesture (a word even Wittgenstein used to described architecture), then the recipient replies with a gesture and that is one reason why also aesthetic judgment can be looked upon as a gesture. It will be the purpose of the conference, not only to underline the importance of gesture in art but also analytically to discuss the different concepts of gesture in relation to different artistic practices and aesthetic approaches.
The conference will take place at The Royal Danish Academy of Arts, Department of the Schools of Visual Arts, Copenhagen. Proposed key note speakers are flautist at the Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, Taina Riikkonen, associate professor in art theory, Carsten Juul, The Royal Danish Academy of Arts, Department of the Schools of Visual Arts, Copenhagen, professor in comparative literature, Bettine Menke, University of Erfurt, Germany, Professor in philosophy, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, IAS Fellow at St. Mary’s College, Durham University.
The program for 2010 is availible online.