Amanda Beech Lecture 21.7.19 15:00

Amanda Beech is an artist and writer. Her work entangles narratives of power, cause and functionalism from philosophical theory, literature and real political events, exploring how the myths that seem necessary for an account of human agency are lived with, but can also be supplanted by a realist politics. Through entangling narratives of power and agency from philosophical theory, noir-ish narratives of TV shows like 24, CSI, the hard-boiled writing of James Ellroy and real political events, her artwork, in video, print and sculpture manifest an argument for a propositional art that executes another form of force to surpass the notion that art simply reflects and reproduces the status quo. The work traverses the aesthetic and philosophical paradigms of institutional, individualistic, metaphysical, rational and mythological authorities to propose a new realist politics of the artwork itself that can surpass the tragic consciousness and the ideal skepticism that has mutually championed and debilitated the value of art in Modern and contemporary culture. In this hard critique of liberal and neo-liberal cultural politics her work examines and produces the condition of language as forceand the force of language with the weight of a commitment to a future.

 

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