A So Disastrous Pathos
St. Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow, ScotlandYear: 2016
The video installation Personas consists of four projections, each showing a single figure. They are cramped inside a small, tall box that slowly revolves on a central horizontal axis. They try to keep straight, but their bodies insiston contorting around the claustrophobic space they are confined to.
Video Installation
A So Disastrous Pathos
St. Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow, ScotlandYear: 2016
“The psyche is always inhabited by forces […]. Psyches do not suffer because they are inhabited, but quite the opposite: because they are no longer inhabited. The malady of the modern world lies in that psyches are no longer inhabitable. That is the source of their suffering! […]”.Thus spoke Pierre Klossowski –idiosyncratic painter, first-rank philosopher, literary malin génie, unparallelled interpeter of Sadean and Nietzschean intricate thought-systems, erudite Latinist and intimate connoisseur of western onto-theological tradition– epitomizing, in his own singular language, modernity’s disease bearing the name “Nihilism”: that is, the levelling of being, the debasement of life through the total demystification and stereotypization of the entire spectrum of living according to industrial/institutional norms. In this existential realm of absolute mediocrity and utility economics, of massively reproduced stupidity and trivialization, baseness and vulgarity, anaesthesia and desingularization, “art” (a vulgarized, highly trivialized term itself) may still establish zones of resistance that can damage gregariousness and prevent it from becoming enormous, privileged territories of “pathophany”, where the “singular” may erupt, where psychic systems may still be inhabited, possessed, obsessed, excorcised, where relations to “pathos”, to the mysteries of life and death, to the very world of affects may be reinvented. This conception of art as “pathophany of the singular” does not fall into the category of a certain theological reestablishment of the former. It is not the equivalent of an “act of faith”. Paraphrasing Klossowski, once again: art is a pathophany, in that an artwork reproduces a demonic stratagem and thereby exorcises and communicates the artist’s obsessional, essentially uncommunicable phantasm in the form of a simulacrum, which regenerates the circle of pathos. Dimitris Ginosatis