Press Release

Imagination, Dead Imagine

NICOLE KLAGSBRUN is pleased to present an installation by JUDITH BARRY at the gallery, 51 Greene Street, New York, MY 10013 from October 19 through November 9, 1991.

Imagination, Dead Imagine, a video projection first seen in Madrid earlier this year will be on view to coincide with the publication of Public Fantasy, the collected essays of Judith Barry.

An androgynous head is projected as if contained within a minimalist cube. Sounds of the head slowly breathing fill the (gallery) space. The head is serene, waiting. Suddenly substance pours overt from all 5 sides, drenching it in what appears to be bodily fluid. The spectator wants to turn away but cannot, the eagle is compiled through the inception of the scopic drive. Horror at the repulsive nature of the substances replaced by fascination with the beauty of these overwhelming natural energies’ as they seem to transform into majestic by abstract landscapes. As Rosalind Krauss has written, “Minimalism was indeed committed to (a) notion of ‘lived bodily perception’… a perception that broke with what it saw as the decorporealized and therefore bloodless, algebraicized condition of abstract painting in which a visually cut loose from the rest of the bodily sensorium and now remade in the model of modernism’s drive towards absolute autonomy had become the picture of an entirely rationalized, instrumentalized, serialized subject.”

Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the primary of the ‘lived bodily experience’ established an internal horizon which produced meaning. Minimalism insisted on an immediacy of experience understood through body; yet it eliminated overt reference to the body.

This Alison of the body finds and echo in the history aesthetics, in particular the sublime. In the 18th century the power and terror of nature unleashed provoked intimations infinity and deity, dwarfing the observer who, aspiring to transcendence, never forgot his insignificance.

19th century concepts of the sublime and the self were later transformed in America into the transcendental landscape, where ‘the painter loses sight of himself in the face of nature’, eliminating his predating or interpretive presence.

Another concept of subjective experience set out by the use of bodily fluids is Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject. ‘Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection. Yet, it is refuse and corpses which show me what I permanently thrust aside in order out live. These bodily fluids, this shit is what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty on the part of death. There I am at the border of my condition as a living being. Such waste drops so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit; cadre, cadaver. It is death infecting life. Abject.’ And it is to this condition that the title Imagination Dead Imagine (after Samuel Beckett) refers.

Judith Barry from Public Fantasy, 1991.

Judith Barry has been invited to contribute a work to the Carnegie International exhibition, held in Pittsburgh from October 19. For further information please call Nicole Klagsburn gallery at (212) 925 5157.