Number of pages : 83
Language : English
ISBN : 9953015473
EAN : 9789953015477
Publisher : Alarm Editions, Human and Urban Publications
Binding : Paperback
Weight : 500.00 grs

Description : Art is the way to approach performatively the illusion of individual decisive agency. The coming to the fact that decisions made and actions taken are never one’s doing but are always in advance to one’s awareness, should be called authenticity. This witnessing stance gives the necessary participassion to the happening of authenticity in art and opens the way to what can be called authentifying, meaning the authentication through testifying. Engaging in the performative modality of criticism, the text follows a comet-like elliptical encounter with the son of Adham al Aamili, a Lebanese artist and activist. And through the question of postmodernism and individual agency, the theoretical text paves the way for a fly-by encounter with the singularity of Ayman Baalbaki’s work. Here, myth and history are flattened out vertically, shedding a differential light to the contemporary context of a territory – for which the globalization appellation has been invented – where the deconstruction of the competing universalities at play and their common Abrahamic legacy is an open-air collective enterprise

Can one Man Save the Art   12/10/09   This book deals with Ayman Baalbaki’s paintings in which two Bible themes are omnipresent: guilt feelings and Babel myth. Both analyses, that of Nayla Tamraz and that of George Rabbath, focus thus on a main theme: self-destruction and divine destruction. The first text goes from a structuralist-like point of view and asserts that the paintings generally represent chaos from within and from without. The half-destructed buildings (metonymy of the City) in the paintings are seen as a Dyonisiac reality. From city to urban myth to catastrophe, Baalbaki’s paintings question History. The second text is mainly based on Derrida’s Deconstruction theory. The paintings are thus another form of questioning reality which is de-constructed - but not disbanded or disintegrated - in an attempt to be better re-constructed (if possible). The lexical field here is very evocative: circular dialectics, emergence, bifurcation, binarism, local/global relationship, metaphor, allegory, metonymy… So many terms to suggest that all kinds of expressive (and impressive) activities - art, fiction, poetry – are cognitively some kind of modelizing the Reality but with an added value: call it idealization, sublimation or symbolization, the homo artisticus expresses himself in an attempt to re-link (religio) with Deity. Serge Gelalian