Understanding Practice (UP) with Amanda Beech

A REALIST ART? AND THE QUESTION OF REAL FICTIONS

The question of art’s ability to speak to that which is unknowable, unspeakable and alien has been a long tradition held in Romanticism and Realism, the former being associated with the subjective physiologies of the individual and the latter being associated with more objective and scientific aims. In the contemporary condition of art’s critique, art terminated both cases in its realization of the impossibility to speak to the question of “how everything hangs together.” This resulted in new paradigms of tragedy, farce, parody, irony and the postmodern sublime. Here, art narrates its own compulsion to mirror reality and produces an infinite and traumatic feedback loop of artistic production. However, making a distinction between what is ‘out there’ and the absolute notion of the impossible, this talk will speak to the question of how art as a form of techno-cultural-scientific machinery might engage the question of what it is to compute, render and manifest vectors of knowledge today beyond the structures of capitalism. Here, focusing on some recent projects and ideas, we will deal with the significant question of art’s capacity to be involved in the production of reality, the importance of fiction: the crucial question of how art communicates what reality is and should be.

Amanda Beech is an artist and writer. In video, painting, print and sculpture her work proposes art as a form of intelligence and power beyond the ideals of capitalism and the limits that art has set for itself by means of its critiques. Exhibiting internationally shows include Delphic Future, Twelve Ten Gallery, Chicago and the Havana Biennale 2021. Forthcoming work includes a book of philosophy, The Intolerable Image, from MIT.