itself as a body standing in an indeterminate manner outside power, sexuality and history. In contrast, Coleman gives experience a historical-materialist contour. With Minimal Art, the intention was to oppose the art criticism of the day by producing a form of art that refused any subjective/linguistic appropriation. In Box , Coleman introduces a dimension of experience that does not exclude meaning, language, critique and history, but gives these categories a concrete form as the necessary basis for all experience. The subject is presented in a socio-geopolitical context, and at the same time enacted on the uncontrolled level of affect and physicality, thus in this regard unconscious responses. The body is thereby conceived as material, as a semiotic bearer of meaning, and, simultaneously, as a psycho-physiological being.57 In this way, Coleman roots the individual and the individual’s experience in a concrete historical context. But he does not do so out of the wish to re-create a coherent tradition. Coleman’s work operates instead with a (Benjamin-like) dialectic between the fragmentary presentation of a historical figure and a present experience. It is as if the intention were to constitute an individual and an idea of history in the process of disappearing, one that results from a depiction and, simultaneously, exists on the very liminal boundary of that which can be represented or experienced. This process is precisely allegorized in the theme of the boxing match. Joyce Carol Oates has written that “every boxing match is a story—a unique and highly condensed drama without words.” She suggests that “boxers are there to establish an absolute experience, a public accounting of the outermost limits of their beings.”58
Benjamin Buchloh terms Coleman’s works an “archaeology of the spectacle.” 59 “In this respect,” he writes, “it is by no means unimportant that Coleman makes the classical arena of the culture of spectacle the object of his work: the public fight between two (athletic) rivals has repeatedly fascinated artists in the 20th century—not only as a primordial form of spectacle but also as a fundamental metaphor for general social relations.” 60 The concept of the archaeological introduced by Buchloh can be given greater precision through the thought of Michel Foucault. 61 Coleman’s approach is “archaeological” precisely in the sense that it does not involve a linear concept of history, but, in a radically discontinuous way, forges links between subjective experience and specific historical events, relating in turn to general cultural phenomena in the history of modernity.
When Guy Debord, who published his opus magnum The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, was asked 21 years later when he would date the beginning of the culture of the spectacle, he answered that the spectacle was hardly 40 years old when his book first came out. 62 In other words, its historical beginning can be dated to the late 1920s, even to around 1927, the year of the rematch between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey. It was the first boxing match to be broadcast live on radio and transmitted by 79 stations in Africa, Latin America, Europe and Australia. It was thus one of the first global mass sports events, a linking of the body with the abstractions of international transmission. 63 Likewise Joyce Carol Oates describes its character as an event for the masses. “Photographs of these events,” she writes, “show jammed arenas with boxing rings like postage-sized altars at their centers, the boxers themselves no more than tiny, heraldic figures. To attend a Dempsey match was not to have seen a Dempsey match, but perhaps that was not the issue.” 64
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
