Untitled Document<\/title>\r\n<style type=\"text\/css\">\r\n\r\n<\/style>\r\n<\/head>\r\n\r\n<body>\r\n Maria Marcos<\/span><\/p>\r\nThe Utopian Body<\/p>\r\n – Camera Obscura, without an Aperture – <\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\nLe corps utopique<\/em><\/p>\r\n Ce lieu que Proust doucement, anxieusement, vient occuper de nouveau à chacun de ses réveils, à ce lieu-là, dès que j’ai les yeux ouverts, je ne peux plus échapper. Non pas que ce soit par lui, cloué sur place, puisque après tout je peux non seulement bouger et remuer, mais je peux le remuer, le bouger, le changer de place…seulement voilà, je ne peux pas me déplacer sans lui, je ne peux pas le laisser là où il est, pour m’en aller moi, ailleurs. Je peux bien aller au bout du monde, je peux bien me tapir le matin sous mes couvertures, me faire aussi petit que je pourrais, je peux bien me laisser fondre au soleil sur la plage, il sera toujours là où je suis. <\/em><\/p>\r\n Il est ici, irréparablement, jamais ailleurs. <\/em><\/p>\r\n Mon corps, c’est le contraire d’une utopie, ce qui n’est jamais sous un autre ciel. Il est le lieu absolu, le petit fragment d’espace avec lequel, au sens strict, je fais corps.<a href=\"#_ftn1\" name=\"_ftnref1\">1<\/a><\/em><\/p>\r\n Michel Foucault: Le corps utopique<\/em><\/p>\r\n Gravity<\/strong><\/p>\r\n The Universal Law of Gravity, formulated at the end of the seventeenth century, was replaced in the twentieth by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, whose conception of gravity is still accepted by science today. Still, it is an area shrouded in a great many unresolved questions that occupy not only the scientific world and science fiction circles, but also research that may be classified as alt-science<\/em> like the Canadian John Hutchison, whose mind-machine, Lifter provoked fierce theoretical debate in the 1980s.<\/p>\r\n The motif of the attraction exerted by mass often appears in art, primarily as a part of interdisciplinary projects like the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.olats.org\/space\/space.php\" target=\"_blank\">Leonardo-Olats Space-art Workshops<\/a>. Here in Central Europe, the Austrian-sponsored event series “<a href=\"http:\/\/webcam.ati.ufg.ac.at\/~gravity\/en_gravity\/index1.html\" target=\"_blank\">Gravity, Art, Religion, Science<\/a>” made this its theme; one component of that series was the project <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludwigmuseum.hu\/moszkvater\/\" target=\"_blank\">Moszkva-tér<\/a><\/em> , which rather forced the relationship between its title and the curator’s conception. Fortunately, this was not the case with Antal Lakner’s exhibition “INERS Double and Micro-gravitational States” at the Trafó art center, where the title precisely describes the show’s subject. <\/p>\r\n Experiences<\/strong><\/p>\r\n While two people were helping me put on Passive Dress<\/em>, which altered my mass to mimic a force of 2G, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s sci-fi love stories flashed through my mind: its mutant protagonists required one another’s help on certain days to deal with the unstable gravitational field of the Earth of the distant future. Those who got none were unable to stand up and lay helpless on the ground until circumstances changed again. <\/p>\r\n Though I remain standing I still feel helpless, even ridiculous in this suit, a feeling only heightened by my growing fatigue and by a certain pain in my back that bothers me every day in the early afternoon, even at 1G. But this little comedy is different from the series of funny moments you get using the Passive Work Implements<\/em>, I am ridiculous by virtue of my biological being, not my social one. <\/p>\r\n To float in Black Hole<\/em>, I have to strip naked, a relatively rare experience for me in my exhibition visits. Then comes a shower in the actors’ washroom that opens onto the gallery for the show’s duration, full of makeup tables and mirrors. I take it all in. <\/p>\r\n In the capsule, whose interior, insulated from all sound and light, measures about 1.5 x 2 x 2.5 meters, there is about 30-40 centimeters of water waiting for me, with a gentle light from below. It is neutral, even subtly elegant, free from all smells, clean – so I lie down in the body-temperature salt solution and turn off the light. It takes me a moment to settle in, but soon I begin to feel the nothingness, or more precisely that I alone am everything. You can hardly notice where the surface of the water is; my heart beats outside of my body. I am fascinated by the variable bounty of my body noises. Comfort; a soft and safe trip. <\/p>\r\n Description<\/strong><\/p>\r\n The show offers the psycho-physiological illusion of two poles of an artificially modified gravitational field. In the outer room there is a 2G-suit on display, giving its wearer the feeling of double the force of gravity, while on offer in the inner room is a flotation tank, the kind used in the lifestyle industry, allowing one to experience a micro-gravitational field of nearly zero. Both are objects intended for use<\/em>, but while the former is the final product of a conceptual design process, the latter is a recreated object, a found method<\/em>. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flotation-tanks.co.uk\/history_of_the_flotation_tank.html\" target=\"_blank\">The booth designed in 1954 by the neuropsychiatrist Dr. John C. Lilly<\/a> developed a significant following in a very short time. While <a href=\"http:\/\/www.samadhitank.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">its manufacturers<\/a> define it as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.deepself.net\/en\/e06.html\" target=\"_blank\">the ultimate work of art<\/a>, it has preserved its therapeutic and experimental nature as well. Among its regular users we find Buckminster Fuller, Timothy Leary, Carl Sagan, and Susan Sontag. In the Lakner flotation tank, we are given a total freedom from stimulus as a counter-pole to cultural stresses. It is like a camera obscura whose aperture opens not onto the world, but onto consciousness itself.<\/p>\r\n Both works in the exhibition realize their purpose through use<\/em>, in the physical sense. But while irony was an integral part of the morphology of the artist’s two earlier series Perceiver Active<\/em> and Passive Work Implements<\/em>, in this case actual use is the precondition for experiencing the piece. In his earlier works, physical experience may have complemented the pieces, but it was not a precondition for receiving them. Subtle modifications of function and conventional use provided the framework for that creative subversiveness, a special character of his work that might perhaps only be compared to Georg Winter’s methods.<a href=\"#_ftn2\" name=\"_ftnref2\">2<\/a> While previously he had inserted the body into a space as a societal entity, a delicately ironic gesture, in this case it is the physical body that becomes the basis for a receptive experience of the work, through a found object – all now without a trace of irony. <\/p>\r\n Standing up straight involves a constant effort, though habit makes its extent difficult to recognize. It becomes clear to us in special situations, like a reduction or increase in gravity’s force. Posturology deals systematically with the control structures of our body consciousness and its psychomotor elements that are the constant companions of our experience in the world, requiring our unremitting exertion. Speaking of this work, Lakner discusses how “sensory-motor movements become conscious activities,” putting his finger on that awareness of the body unique to INERS technology. Lakner describes it as “the zero degree of sensation.” He is attempting a repositioning of our sensory systems by providing insight into the sensory human body set at the null point of our cultural experience. This work takes us to the outermost limits of representation, where the zero point of visuality is marked out within the observer’s utopian body. <\/p>\r\nTranslated by Jim Tucker\r\n<\/em><\/p>\r\n<hr>\r\n<a href=\"#_ftnref1\" name=\"_ftn1\">1<\/a> Essai littéraire de Michel Foucault, Le corps utopique<\/em>, France Culture, Phonothéque de l’INA 1966\/12\/21<\/p>\r\n<a href=\"#_ftnref2\" name=\"_ftn2\">2<\/a> The comparison is no accident, as the two have collaborated on a number of joint projects in recent years. Deep intellectual affinities run through their works. The joint projects of Antal Lakner and Georg Winter are: Expedition I<\/em>, Műcsarnok-Szépművészeti Múzeum (Exhibition Hall at the Museum of Fine Arts), Budapest 1991; Emmenthal Expedition<\/em>, Studió Galéria, Budapest 1993; UGAR<\/em>, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin 1997.<\/p>\r\n<\/body>\r\n<\/html>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Untitled Document Maria Marcos The Utopian Body – Camera Obscura, without an Aperture – Le corps utopique Ce lieu que Proust doucement, anxieusement, vient occuper de nouveau à chacun de ses réveils, à ce lieu-là, dès que j’ai les yeux ouverts, je ne peux plus échapper. Non pas que ce soit par lui, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":630292,"parent":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-kritika"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}

{"id":400294,"date":"2006-01-18T23:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-18T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/?p=400294"},"modified":"2006-01-18T23:00:00","modified_gmt":"2006-01-18T23:00:00","slug":"az-utopikus-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/kritika\/az-utopikus-test\/","title":{"rendered":"The Utopian Body"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nUntitled Document<\/title>\r\n<style type=\"text\/css\">\r\n\r\n<\/style>\r\n<\/head>\r\n\r\n<body>\r\n Maria Marcos<\/span><\/p>\r\nThe Utopian Body<\/p>\r\n – Camera Obscura, without an Aperture – <\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\nLe corps utopique<\/em><\/p>\r\n Ce lieu que Proust doucement, anxieusement, vient occuper de nouveau à chacun de ses réveils, à ce lieu-là, dès que j’ai les yeux ouverts, je ne peux plus échapper. Non pas que ce soit par lui, cloué sur place, puisque après tout je peux non seulement bouger et remuer, mais je peux le remuer, le bouger, le changer de place…seulement voilà, je ne peux pas me déplacer sans lui, je ne peux pas le laisser là où il est, pour m’en aller moi, ailleurs. Je peux bien aller au bout du monde, je peux bien me tapir le matin sous mes couvertures, me faire aussi petit que je pourrais, je peux bien me laisser fondre au soleil sur la plage, il sera toujours là où je suis. <\/em><\/p>\r\n Il est ici, irréparablement, jamais ailleurs. <\/em><\/p>\r\n Mon corps, c’est le contraire d’une utopie, ce qui n’est jamais sous un autre ciel. Il est le lieu absolu, le petit fragment d’espace avec lequel, au sens strict, je fais corps.<a href=\"#_ftn1\" name=\"_ftnref1\">1<\/a><\/em><\/p>\r\n Michel Foucault: Le corps utopique<\/em><\/p>\r\n Gravity<\/strong><\/p>\r\n The Universal Law of Gravity, formulated at the end of the seventeenth century, was replaced in the twentieth by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, whose conception of gravity is still accepted by science today. Still, it is an area shrouded in a great many unresolved questions that occupy not only the scientific world and science fiction circles, but also research that may be classified as alt-science<\/em> like the Canadian John Hutchison, whose mind-machine, Lifter provoked fierce theoretical debate in the 1980s.<\/p>\r\n The motif of the attraction exerted by mass often appears in art, primarily as a part of interdisciplinary projects like the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.olats.org\/space\/space.php\" target=\"_blank\">Leonardo-Olats Space-art Workshops<\/a>. Here in Central Europe, the Austrian-sponsored event series “<a href=\"http:\/\/webcam.ati.ufg.ac.at\/~gravity\/en_gravity\/index1.html\" target=\"_blank\">Gravity, Art, Religion, Science<\/a>” made this its theme; one component of that series was the project <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludwigmuseum.hu\/moszkvater\/\" target=\"_blank\">Moszkva-tér<\/a><\/em> , which rather forced the relationship between its title and the curator’s conception. Fortunately, this was not the case with Antal Lakner’s exhibition “INERS Double and Micro-gravitational States” at the Trafó art center, where the title precisely describes the show’s subject. <\/p>\r\n Experiences<\/strong><\/p>\r\n While two people were helping me put on Passive Dress<\/em>, which altered my mass to mimic a force of 2G, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s sci-fi love stories flashed through my mind: its mutant protagonists required one another’s help on certain days to deal with the unstable gravitational field of the Earth of the distant future. Those who got none were unable to stand up and lay helpless on the ground until circumstances changed again. <\/p>\r\n Though I remain standing I still feel helpless, even ridiculous in this suit, a feeling only heightened by my growing fatigue and by a certain pain in my back that bothers me every day in the early afternoon, even at 1G. But this little comedy is different from the series of funny moments you get using the Passive Work Implements<\/em>, I am ridiculous by virtue of my biological being, not my social one. <\/p>\r\n To float in Black Hole<\/em>, I have to strip naked, a relatively rare experience for me in my exhibition visits. Then comes a shower in the actors’ washroom that opens onto the gallery for the show’s duration, full of makeup tables and mirrors. I take it all in. <\/p>\r\n In the capsule, whose interior, insulated from all sound and light, measures about 1.5 x 2 x 2.5 meters, there is about 30-40 centimeters of water waiting for me, with a gentle light from below. It is neutral, even subtly elegant, free from all smells, clean – so I lie down in the body-temperature salt solution and turn off the light. It takes me a moment to settle in, but soon I begin to feel the nothingness, or more precisely that I alone am everything. You can hardly notice where the surface of the water is; my heart beats outside of my body. I am fascinated by the variable bounty of my body noises. Comfort; a soft and safe trip. <\/p>\r\n Description<\/strong><\/p>\r\n The show offers the psycho-physiological illusion of two poles of an artificially modified gravitational field. In the outer room there is a 2G-suit on display, giving its wearer the feeling of double the force of gravity, while on offer in the inner room is a flotation tank, the kind used in the lifestyle industry, allowing one to experience a micro-gravitational field of nearly zero. Both are objects intended for use<\/em>, but while the former is the final product of a conceptual design process, the latter is a recreated object, a found method<\/em>. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flotation-tanks.co.uk\/history_of_the_flotation_tank.html\" target=\"_blank\">The booth designed in 1954 by the neuropsychiatrist Dr. John C. Lilly<\/a> developed a significant following in a very short time. While <a href=\"http:\/\/www.samadhitank.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">its manufacturers<\/a> define it as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.deepself.net\/en\/e06.html\" target=\"_blank\">the ultimate work of art<\/a>, it has preserved its therapeutic and experimental nature as well. Among its regular users we find Buckminster Fuller, Timothy Leary, Carl Sagan, and Susan Sontag. In the Lakner flotation tank, we are given a total freedom from stimulus as a counter-pole to cultural stresses. It is like a camera obscura whose aperture opens not onto the world, but onto consciousness itself.<\/p>\r\n Both works in the exhibition realize their purpose through use<\/em>, in the physical sense. But while irony was an integral part of the morphology of the artist’s two earlier series Perceiver Active<\/em> and Passive Work Implements<\/em>, in this case actual use is the precondition for experiencing the piece. In his earlier works, physical experience may have complemented the pieces, but it was not a precondition for receiving them. Subtle modifications of function and conventional use provided the framework for that creative subversiveness, a special character of his work that might perhaps only be compared to Georg Winter’s methods.<a href=\"#_ftn2\" name=\"_ftnref2\">2<\/a> While previously he had inserted the body into a space as a societal entity, a delicately ironic gesture, in this case it is the physical body that becomes the basis for a receptive experience of the work, through a found object – all now without a trace of irony. <\/p>\r\n Standing up straight involves a constant effort, though habit makes its extent difficult to recognize. It becomes clear to us in special situations, like a reduction or increase in gravity’s force. Posturology deals systematically with the control structures of our body consciousness and its psychomotor elements that are the constant companions of our experience in the world, requiring our unremitting exertion. Speaking of this work, Lakner discusses how “sensory-motor movements become conscious activities,” putting his finger on that awareness of the body unique to INERS technology. Lakner describes it as “the zero degree of sensation.” He is attempting a repositioning of our sensory systems by providing insight into the sensory human body set at the null point of our cultural experience. This work takes us to the outermost limits of representation, where the zero point of visuality is marked out within the observer’s utopian body. <\/p>\r\nTranslated by Jim Tucker\r\n<\/em><\/p>\r\n<hr>\r\n<a href=\"#_ftnref1\" name=\"_ftn1\">1<\/a> Essai littéraire de Michel Foucault, Le corps utopique<\/em>, France Culture, Phonothéque de l’INA 1966\/12\/21<\/p>\r\n<a href=\"#_ftnref2\" name=\"_ftn2\">2<\/a> The comparison is no accident, as the two have collaborated on a number of joint projects in recent years. Deep intellectual affinities run through their works. The joint projects of Antal Lakner and Georg Winter are: Expedition I<\/em>, Műcsarnok-Szépművészeti Múzeum (Exhibition Hall at the Museum of Fine Arts), Budapest 1991; Emmenthal Expedition<\/em>, Studió Galéria, Budapest 1993; UGAR<\/em>, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin 1997.<\/p>\r\n<\/body>\r\n<\/html>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Untitled Document Maria Marcos The Utopian Body – Camera Obscura, without an Aperture – Le corps utopique Ce lieu que Proust doucement, anxieusement, vient occuper de nouveau à chacun de ses réveils, à ce lieu-là, dès que j’ai les yeux ouverts, je ne peux plus échapper. Non pas que ce soit par lui, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":630292,"parent":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-kritika"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}