Univocal
3 total works
Seeking out the minor lights of friendship in a time of fascism
Dante once spoke, in his Divine Comedy, of the miniscule lights, in the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno, who, contrary to the great lights that shined bright within the sublime circles of Paradise, frailly wandered in the somber pockets of glimmering light within the darkness. Pliny the Elder was once preoccupied by a type of fly named pyrallis or pyrotocon, which was only able to fly within fire: “as long as it remains in the fire, it can fly; when its flight takes it out too far a distance, it dies.”
Through his readings of Dante, Pasolini, Walter Benjamin, and others, Georges Didi-Huberman seeks again to understand this strange, minor light, the signals of small beings in search of love and friendship. Their flickering presence serves as a counterforce to the blinding sovereign power that Giorgio Agamben calls The Kingdom and the Glory, that artificial brilliance that once surrounded dictators and today emanates from every screen. In this timely reflection, much needed in our time of excessive light, Didi-Huberman’s Survival of the Fireflies offers a humble yet powerful image of individual hope and desire: the firefly-image.
What would a sculpture look like that has as its task to touch thought? For the French philosopher and Art Historian, Georges Didi-Huberman, this is the central question that permeates throughout the work of Italian artist Giuseppe Penone. Through a careful study of Penone’s work regarding a sculptural and haptic process of contact with place, thought, and artistic practice, Didi-Huberman takes the reader on a journey through various modes of thinking by way of being. Taking Penone’s artwork “Being the river” as a thematic starting point, Didi-Huberman sketches a sweeping view of how artists through the centuries have worked with conceptions of the skull, that is, the mind, and ruminates on where thought is indeed located.
From Leonardo da Vinci to Albrecht Dürer, Didi-Huberman guides us to the work of Penone and from there, into the attempts of a sculptor whose works strives to touch thought. What we uncover is a sculptor whose work becomes a series of traces of the site of thought. Attempting to trace, by way of a series of frottages, reports, and developments, this imperceptible zone of contact. The result is a kind of fossil of the brain: the site of thought, namely, the site for getting lost and for disproving space. Sculpting at the same time what inhabits as well as what incorporates us.
For Georges Didi-Huberman, artist James Turrell is an inventor of impossible spaces and unthinkable sites, of aporias, of fables. Creator of some of the most fascinating works of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Turrell uses as his medium the most elemental material of sight and art: light. One crucial aspect of his work is the fabulation of place and vision with its foundation deep in history.
Didi-Huberman takes the reader on a journey between the impossible limit of the horizon and the arrival into a site of reverie and light, from the story of Exodus to the Pala d'Oro of San Marco's Basilica in Venice, through art history and the origins of religious worship, finally plunging into Turrell's cadmium dust and light, into the Painted Desert of his installation Roden Crater. For the esteemed art historian, Turrell's artistic practice becomes the equivalent of walking along endless pathways in the desert, in "minuscule cathedrals where man discovers himself walking in color."