. I could think of no better place to display a crime scene than a gallery room of bare white walls and dim spotlights. At the Texas State Galleries, there was an exhibit called Philosophy of the Encounter by Tatiana Istomina. In the middle of the room, there is a woman's stuffed body, disemboweled and decapitated. There is another body stuck in the wall in a similar position. Ahead is mounted to the wall or displayed on a pedestal. A stuffed brain and pieces of it are on another pedestal. And all around the room firmly, photographic paintings hang around but depict diagrams, objects, or nothing. Or maybe something, but where the arrows lead and what they reveal is unknowable. And it may remain so. Tatiana's inspiration behind Philosophy of the Encounter was the mysterious death of Hélène Rhytman, the wife of Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. In the last days of her life, she was helping care for her husband's deteriorating mental health. Then the next day, he had strangled her to death. The phrase for every great man there is a great woman would apply to this story. If you did not know much about Rhytman, there are some text pieces in the back wall of a memoir, Fhilosofhy of the Encounter, that tells us about her intense relationship with Althusser as his mind deteriorated. However, the text has been cut up, arranged, and pasted. In succession, they become difficult to read if one tries. Everything around this gallery is just pieces. Pieces that could or could not be a clue to Hélène's mystery, and bring us little closure to what happened to her. Just like the video that plays out a scenario of her life, the transitions between pivotal moments fade into black, into lapses. I enjoy the experience of frustration this exhibit shows. The kind of frustration when one is trying to solve a mystery. There are no facts. It's hard to say so without proper evidence, unless one was a witness. And in this piece I also understand Istomina's exploration of three concepts: violence, knowledge, and abstraction. She mentioned them at the presentation I attended where she talked about her work and her thoughts. Violence is impulsive and quick. It happens in the blink of an eye, so it's hard to determine a few moments after a violent event, what had happened, what had caused it. A fatal gunshot and a fallen body. A tremor in the earth, but you can only feel the shocks. Its origin is a mystery and the cause unknowable in the moment. I think this the fascination with violence I see in her work. It's shown in Philosophy of the Encounter and The Budanov Case, a series of paintings about about the death of Yuri Budanov, a Russian Colonel. His body in these oil paintings is depicted at various angles. All of the paintings are off-center like photographic shots of a crime scene. The people are faceless with minimal details, the trees are nondescript and blobby green. But the general idea is there like a violent hazy memory. Knowledge is experience, hearsay, facts, all things we've accumulated for a purpose to put to use, to understand our reality. The diagrams, body, the text, is all information gathered to discover a greater knowledge of the violence, that which we are not present for. But whether it's useful or meaningless is yet to be determined.
Abstraction is in the dotted lines, the painted, filmy oil on paper. There might be some true meaning to Hélène's death, a vital clue to understand Althusser's state of mind. To someone these letters and formulas will make sense. But is it the right sense? I enjoy the presence of the giant brain. It makes me question knowledge and how much of what we know is representational or abstract, a deeper representation of something real but the true meaning is the one we give it. Like the words. The symbols and sounds don't have a meaning unless we can imagine the object, or remember the taste. We have to associate the word with an experience to really understand its definition. Otherwise, it'd be hard to understand words through other words we barely understand. Philosophy of the Encounter delighted me as it challenged my very perceptions of what was my knowledge through violence based on the murder of a woman who devoted her mind to her husband. It taught me the pervasiveness of abstraction, how useful we find it a day today, but we don't think about our knowledge that way. If you'd like to see more of her work and ponder on these three aspects, here is a link to her site. Experiencing the pieces arranged in a gallery is a unique experience. It's a work in itself. I recommend anyone to check it out when it will be displayed again. However, here's a link to the video, which was my favorite piece in the gallery, along with a painting of a glove. -Sam Medina
1 Comment
Annabel Marshall
11/19/2019 07:29:41 pm
The way you tied together both the lecture and the exhibit on display is a way I never would have connected the dots. The comparison of the images shown as items that could be clues in an investigation, an unclear one at that, sum up my feelings about the exhibit. It is confusing and almost convoluted, and it takes multiple walkthroughs with outside information in order to try to put together what all the works mean as one whole exhibition (which they must be hence the reason it is shown as an exhibition). It has watercolor paintings with three large circular shapes that coincidentally coincide with the three circle Venn diagram. The exhibition also has digital works that play with time and sound, and soft sculpture as well. The way that the disemboweled sculpture connects with the case that is show in “Philosophy of the Encounter” by showing a form that has been brutally killed and mutilated. It’s similar to the case that Tatiana is discussing, which as you talked about is the murder of a woman who was married to a famous philosopher. Her murder was overlooked, which is mimicked in the very mild depiction of the body. If you weren’t paying attention, you would completely miss the fact that it is a murdered body. It is soft fabric and is stuffed like a child’s toy, unlike the case of a strangled woman. The soft material scale and the mild colors add to this by creating a small and passive form, that draws little attention to itself, even as the form lays dead, decapitated and disemboweled on the floor.
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