Mostish Will Speak on Darkness

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Chapman, Neil ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8253-0256 (2017) Mostish Will Speak on Darkness. Haunt Journal of Art, 4. pp. 42-50. ISSN 2334-1165

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Abstract / Summary

The essay pursues a philosophical inquiry into darkness, looking particularly at images of the dark and how they appear in literature and art. A passage from Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse (1927) is considered for the way that the author explores questions of subjectivity on the basis of a certain vagueness inherent in darkness as metaphor. Fictional form is used to assemble different kinds of discourse including memoir and criticism, so that the process of writing allows the emergence of thought in a way that contributes to philosophical work while resisting the narrow aspirations of a discipline. Thus the essay proposes and explores the values of cross-disciplinary work.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: ‘Mostish will Speak on Darkness’ revisits the script of a performance lecture delivered as part of the Summer Exhibitionists performance festival at the ICA London. Its theme of darkness in art and literature has been developed more recently as a component of Protowork as Art’s Expanded Writing Practice (PhD, Reading University 2011). In that study, metaphors of darkness were considered in relation to Henri Bergson’s ‘virtuality’, developed by Gilles Deleuze in Bergsonism (Zone Books 1988). ‘Mostish will Speak on Darkness’ employs fictional narrative to reframe the philosophical inquiry, memoir as a way of manifesting a singular approach to the philosophical problem, thus allowing material art practice to condition the way that the philosophy is addressed and making available a new perspective on the philosophical inquiry through its manifestation as art-writing. This piece also engages with the politics of the relations of institutional disciplines, showing how the artist’s work reconfigures what would be written about differently in philosophical discourse. ‘Mostish’ was published in Haunt, a journal in which ‘speculative and innovative art writing practices’ are proposed as ‘paramount to the development of radical thinking and imagination.’ Its broad research question is to ask what part art-writing plays in an inquiry framed also as a philosophical problem. Its more specific question is to consider how actions at the limits of visibility can produce an experience of time that in turn conditions subjectivity.
ISSN: 2334-1165
Subjects: Creative Art & Design > Fine Art
Philosophy & Psychology
Literature
Courses by Department: The Falmouth School of Art
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Depositing User: Neil Chapman
Date Deposited: 02 Nov 2017 15:00
Last Modified: 18 Nov 2024 15:01
URI: https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/2731
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