Berkeley Art Museum Explores the Logic of the Ghost in Exhibition
Francis Bacon, Study for Figure V, 1956; oil on canvas; 60 x 46-1/2”; gift of Joachim Jean Aberbach.
BERKELEY, CA.- Hauntology, essentially the logic of the ghost, is
a concept as ephemeral and abstract as the term implies. Since it was
first used by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in a 1993 lecture
delivered at UC Riverside concerning the state of Marxist thought in the
post-Communist era, the term hauntology has been widely discussed in
philosophical and political circles, as well as becoming a major
influence in the development of various sub-genres of electronic music.
This exhibition focuses primarily on the museum’s recent
contemporary acquisitions, mixing these with a number of other works
representing a wide range of periods and styles. Although the artists
included in Hauntology do not necessarily see themselves as part of a
larger movement, when viewed collectively a number of resonances appear,
not unrelated to the musical interpretations of the theme. Works in
Hauntology frequently incorporate archaic imagery, styles, or techniques
and evoke uncertainty, mystery, inexpressible fears, and unsatisfied
longing.
For Derrida himself, hauntology is a philosophy of history that
upsets the easy progression of time by proposing that the present is
simultaneously haunted by the past and the future. Specifically, Derrida
suggests that the specter of Marxist utopianism haunts the present,
capitalist society, in what he describes as "the persistence of a
present past.” The notion of hauntology also can be seen as describing
the fluidity of identity among individuals, marking the dynamic and
inevitable shades of influence that link one person’s experience to
another’s, both in the present and over time.
In the fifteen years since Derrida first used this term, hauntology,
and the related term, hauntological, have been adopted by the British
music critic Simon Reynolds to describe a recurring influence in
electronic music created primarily by artists in the United Kingdom who
use and manipulate samples culled from the past (mostly old wax-cylinder
recordings, classical records, library music, or postwar popular music)
to invoke either a euphoric or unsettling view of an imagined future.
The music has an anachronistic quality hinting at an unrecognizable
familiarity that is often dreamlike, blurry, and melancholic—what
Reynolds describes as "an uneasy mixture of the ancient and the modern.”
This exhibition marks the first time that a museum has presented
works of visual art within the framework of hauntology. Works by Luc
Tuymans, Paul Sietsema, Carrie Mae Weems, Bruce Conner, Robert
Gutierrez, Diane Arbus, Travis Collinson, Paul Schiek, Arnold Kemp, and
others form loose groups in which one can discern various thematic
concentrations: the enigma of place and placelessness, memorial and
longing, transitional beings, displacement and disappearance, demonic
manifestations, auras, elegies of nature, and the translucency of the
psyche.
Fuente:
www.artdaily.org
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