Matthew Rawcliffe

  Just a short post about feeling lonely. Let’s start with a specific moment of loneliness, maybe it will blossom into something more as I put words to it. I was at Trapholt (Kolding, Denmark) recently for their exhibition Connect Me, which is a collection of artworks exploring viewer/participant/audience dynamics in unnerving ways. This ranges from a conversation with an AI which entices you to sell your data ( A Faustian Friendship , Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm, 2022) to a kinetic sculpture informed by facial recognition which takes inspiration from the viewers gender ( Cat's Cradle, Lilla LoCurto & Bill Outcault, 2020). I was surprisingly moved by a very simple work. Approached from afar, traversed by the galleries deep walls, there is a tree in the distance. It looks filmic - somehow flattened by smoke and lighting effect. As I get closer it pixelates, it is not a tree at all - it is a screen, maybe it is not even a real tree, it is a digital affectation of a tree. There a...

some shower thoughts: What is a performance? It surely cannot be a moment? It is so fickle. One thing goes wrong and it is not the performance anymore. The dancers are late. The music does not play. The lights are in the wrong place. Then is it not the performance anymore? If the writer pens a famous book about something that happened and was not supposed to... did it not really happen, or at least it happened but it was not the thing itself?  Have I forgotten energy? I was dancing in class and I could feel that the teacher was the only person in the room , in the moment. Everyone was doing the same thing, if you should look at it from the outside. But they were somehow elsewhere? I remember watching the Danish Royal Ballet dance Sharon Eyal’s work and falling asleep halfway through it. I(we) need a reminder that doing isn't enough. I need criticism in the swamp's messiness (hey there Schön). The Truth - Part One. The interchangeableness of meaningful words - choreographers th...

I went to Moesgaard Museum today, which I’ve been wanting to visit for a while. It’s a very beautiful building, I had the morning off from work and the sun was shining.   I was particularly interested in catching the three below ethnographic exhibitions: The field work of the ethnographer: Among the Chukchis in Sibiria - the first of a new series of exhibitions about the field work behind the ethnographic part of Moesgaard Museum. The Lives of the Dead - how the dead live on in different cultures and...how the relationship between the living and the dead is experienced.   HOME - Among nomads, refugees, seafarers, and migrants focuses on the meaning of home for different people, who have in common that their homes are in disruption, spread over several countries, in motion, or detached from one physical place. The exhibition is a result of the research project The Materiality of Home among Mobile Groups, conducted by Cecil Marie Schou Pallesen and Anders Emil Rasmussen from ...

  I want to show that theory—in the requisite classical sense—is never forthcoming in aesthetics, and that we would do much better as philosophers to supplant the question, "What is the nature of art?," by other questions, the answers to which will provide us with all the understanding of the arts there can be. I want to show that the inadequacies of the theories are not primarily occasioned by any legitimate difficulty such, e.g., as the vast complexity of art, which might be corrected by further probing and research. Their basic inadequacies reside instead in a fundamental misconception of art. Aesthetic theory—all of it—is wrong in principle in thinking that a correct theory is possible because it radically misconstrues the logic of the concept of art. Its main contention that "art" is amenable to real or any kind of true definition is false.  (Weitz, 1964) I am inclined to agree with Weitz in his rejection of Aesthetic Theory, it feels like returning to the idea...