Newman featured in Blake Prize Director’s Cut Exhibition
Andrew Newman’s work Attempt to fill an empty space (Performance Anxiety) will be featured in the Blake Prize Director’s Cut Exhibition that opens October 7 and runs until November 7. The works selected for the exhibition feature themes relating to religion, spirituality and human justice. Newman’s video installation is featured alongside work by Gillie and Marc Schattner and Fiona White. Andrew Newman’s video installation Attempt to fill an empty space (Performance Anxiety) is a crucifix. When Newman envisioned the work he wasn’t picturing a crown of thorn laden Christ nailed to the cross. He imagined arms outstretched, the moment before the embrace. Christ does have his arms outstretched and it perhaps in part why the symbol of the crucifix has peristed. He sacrifices himself. He succumbs to the other. He offers the embrace, the ideal of oneness. But his arms are pinned back. He is stuck in time. He is stuck in the moment before the embrace. An eternity of wavering before oneness. He is stuck in Pothos.
The following is an extract from Andrew Newman’s essay Mediating Pothos:
This is the moment Attempt to fill an empty space (Performance Anxiety) reflects. It is the moment before the embrace when my arm reaches to touch the other. Before touch. It is the moment of anxiety that Barthes writes of an electrified hand. Here I desire the other. And here in the frenzy of language in my mind I am conscious of the separate abstracts of I and you. And my body shakes with the friciton that occurs through the yearning for my self to succumb to the imaginary.
I come in Self-annihilation and the grandeur of Imagination
To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Savioiur
To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration
To cast off Bacon, Locke, and Newton from Albion’s covering,
To take off his filthy garments and clothe him with Imagination
To cast off from Poetry all that is not Inspiration
For William Blake the act of crucifixion is associated with the opposition of Reason to Imagination and Love. In Blake’s poem Jerusalem, Albion speaks to his sons saying “I have educated you in the crucifying cruelties of Demonstration,” where Demonstration is the work of Reason.
Reason, however, is not the Imaginary’s antagonist but rather the concrete – the physical. This is why the body shakes before the beloved’s embrace. The body battles the abstract, violently refusing to succumb to the imaginary. It cannot slip into the void yet the spirit yearns to. Instead the lover mediates between the imaginary and the body with language, with image, with art. The lover does this to shape a space outside the body, a space where the abstract of oneness can take refuge.