CHESTER UNIVERSITY School of Art and Design
19-21 April 2007
In the face of a well-theorised notion of difference the emergence of repetition as a key visual and cultural concept, and its suggested persistence of sameness, raises a range of questions. Constructions of time, subjectivity, organisation of power, gender, desire, creativity are all brought into focus through the movement of return and repeat that in turn highlights fundamental questions about subjectivity, embodiment and meaning. The contemporary age’s acceleration of technology has placed us within the logical outcomes of Marx early theorisation of repetitive labour and Benjamin’s reflections on art and mechanical reproduction. Repetition and its implications could therefore be seen as pivotal to an understanding of our contemporary cultural condition. Re-visiting, or re-assessing some of the founding ideas of modern culture could be seen as more than just repeating ourselves but, in the act itself, the reflection of a inescapable state of being. This conference addresses the implication of repetition for contemporary culture and its creative possibilities does repetition, as cultures dominant, seek to keep us in the same place, or does it reveal to us the possibilities of moving forward?
ABSTRACT: Chasing Shadows: Tactics for Getting lost
My paper explores the act of repetition evident in the gesture of following another, a mimetic form of performance that can be understood as an articulation of the desire to be led astray or to ‘lose oneself’ through relinquishing or giving over responsibility for one’s own actions. The act of following another is proposed as a form of escape or immersion whereby the itinerary of another is borrowed as a device for wilful disorientation, as a catalyst for a game of chance or as the impetus for ludic wandering. Referring to the writing of Roger Caillois on the practice of mimicry, the act of following another is explored as a form of both playful inhabitation and of involuntary possession; where the repeated gesture can be interpreted as a form of psychological deliquescence, and yet also as a strategic or ludic practice that performs to specific ‘rules of the game’. Drawing on the critical connections between surrealist and contemporary practices as a point of conceptual departure, the notion of repetition inherent in following another can be positioned as a paradigm of both compulsion and criticality: the embodiment of both existential alienation or psychosis, and a form of performative, playful resistance or role-play.
The full conference paper can be found here.
More information about the overall conference can be found here
- emma cocker
- Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of thinking-in-action therein. Cocker’s language-based artistic research comprises a matrix of writing, reading and conversation practices, including diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2024. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. She is Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University.