BdSpinoza

Momenteel heeft ze een Solo Exhibition in het Moderna Museet te Stockholm. In een bericht daarover wordt meegedeeld dat ze bezig zou zijn met het maken van een opera over de teksten van Spinoza die ze gebruikte voor haar installatie uit 2008 Vertical Monad.
Dat voor de liefhebbers van deze eigenzinnige kunstenares.

In VERTICAL MONAD the viewer must listen to a text read in Latin. It is the opening pages of Spinoza’s Ethics, which resounds in a space whose monochromatic blue-grey color unifies all the other elements: a vertical monitor on its base, the geometry of the room itself, the light without any visible source, the low ceiling, the color of the carpeting, the color that practically appears to float on the screen, the inflections of the text, the rhythm of the reader’s speech, the tone of voice. This arrangement constitutes a precise experience which engenders a new mode of perception between the image of the space—which one might call an “image of synthesis”—and that of the invisible text. The work thus seems to be a veritable machine of power, outside of the networks of power, and inside ourselves. Faced with the constant and increasing leveling of systems of representation that have become modes of understanding and information, Sturtevant finds ways out—just as the concept of the “monad” in Leibniz, re-read by Deleuze, is a fundamental “way out” in the history of mankind and philosophy.¹) Sturtevant does not assess the situation; she leads a work the way one leads negotiations, always maintaining the point of view that all is not equivalent. The ethics entail the permanent evaluation of values and practices, of forces exerted, and the aim is never to let life, and hence art, depreciate. As Deleuze used to reiterate, the problem is not and has never been to say “this is better” or “this is worse”—that is, “this is good” and “this is bad.” Every epoch, every society, has its own procession of horrors as well as its extraordinary creations. In every great unified whole we find units or, more precisely, monads without doors or windows, which make up the whole. We are these doorless, window less monads. We are radical singularities, differences linked together by one (or several) strings to the world of other monads. Exchanges with them remain fragile and uninteresting if they are not based, first and foremost, on agreements and on complicities of thought and sensation. Only thus are we able to construct new arrangements between monads and territories, which must inevitably be reorganized for each context. And only thus is VERTICAL MONAD connected to Sturtevant’s world, where one can clearly see how the artist perceives each creation and each situation as a unitary, constituent element of a much larger reality.