Judith Butler from Precarious Life (full text here)
Tag: vulnerability
Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming contemporary violence
Rosi Braidotti
Spent the day thinking about these two images (right: Judith Scott / left: Claude Cahun) and this Olivia Laing paragraph (The Lonely City)
Kiki Smith
American, born Germany, 1954
Blood Pool, 1992
Wax, gauze, and pigment
106.7 x 61 x 40.6 cm (42 x 24 x 16 in.)
The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence.
Simone Weil
Rebecca Horn, Room of Earth from El Rio de la Luna
To the extent that we commit violence, we are acting on another, putting the other at risk, causing the other damage, threatening to expunge the other. In a way, we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot preempt.
Judith Butler
Utrechtse Krop, 1999 (exhibition)
Paul Kooiker
Utrechtse Krop was the name given to a thyroid condition once common in the Dutch town of Utrecht, due to a deficiency of iodine in drinking water.
Utrechtse Krop [the exhibition] showed unique medical historical photographs alongside work by Dutch photographer and artist Paul Kooiker.
The exhibition Utrechtse Krop in De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal centred around the appeal of illness and the fragility of our physical being. The photographs on display came from the archives of Utrecht`s university hospital – records of medical disorders, photographed since circa 1890.
In the early days of medical photography clinical standards had yet to be formulated for photographic images. Consequently, many photographs are more poignant and beautiful than they are scientific. Light, space and patients complete submission to doctors and photographers evoke feelings of compassion, surprise, embarrassment and amusement rather than disgust or scientific curiosity. [x]
Chris Burden – Prelude to 220, or 110 (1971)
Burden lay bolted with copper bands to a concrete floor, near two buckets of water in which live 110-volt lines had been submerged. Had anyone visiting the gallery chosen to spill the water, Burden would have been electrocuted. Such performances created a context in which it was possible (though not probable) that the artist would die. Fear or pain, Burden said, “energize the situation,” and that energy was his subject.
(Source: C. Carr, «On Edge. Let’s Make an Ordeal—Young Artists Recover the Conceptual ‘70s in the Material ’90s,» 1998, http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9849/carr.php)
Little Bristling Soul 