Sequence 2
dal 12/9/2009 al 10/10/2009
Segnalato da
12/9/2009
Sequence 2
Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York
One or Two Works, One Week
Opening on Sunday, September 13, Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to present Sequence 2: One or Two Works, One
Week, an exhibition wherein over the course of four weeks, several sometimes extremely different – not to say
opposed – works will be installed, perhaps like shots in a film experiment, one or two at a time in the main
gallery space. After hanging upstairs for a few days, exhibited works will migrate to the downstairs gallery,
accumulating over the month-long exhibition period to constitute another sequence, a sequence in space this
time around.
Week 1: Olivier Mosset (Sunday, September 13 – Sunday, September 20)
Week 2: Hans Bellmer (Wednesday, September 23 – Sunday, September 27)
Week 3: Liz Deschenes (Wednesday, September 30 – Sunday, October 4)
Week 4: R. H. Quaytman (Wednesday, October 7 – Sunday, October 11)
This show is the second installment of an ongoing exhibition project we initiated in May 2008.
Slavoj Zizek
The Political Parallax
Wednesday, October 7, 2009 7:30PM
A Lacanian Ink event
Seating is available on a first-come, first-serve basis and is limited to 85 people.
Confirmations will be sent to the 1st 85 RSVPs only.
Please RSVP to post@miguelabreugallery.com
"... The illusion on which the two stories rely, that of putting two incompatible phenomena on the same level, is
strictly analogous to what Kant called "transcendental illusion," the illusion of being able to use the same
language for phenomena which are mutually untranslatable and can be grasped only in a kind of parallax view,
constantly shifting perspective between two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible. Thus
there is no rapport between the two levels, no shared space – although they are closely connected, even identical in
a way, they are, as it were, on the opposed sides of a Moebius strip. The encounter between Leninist politics and
modernist art (exemplified in the fantasy of Lenin meeting Dadaists in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich) cannot
structurally take place; more radically, revolutionary politics and revolutionary art move in different
temporalities –although they are linked, they are two sides of the same phenomena which, precisely as two sides,
can never meet. There is more than a historical accident in the fact that, in matters of culture, Leninists admired
great classical art, while many modernists were political conservatives, proto-Fascists even. Is this not already the
lesson of the link between the French Revolution and German Idealism? Although they are two sides of the same
historical moment, they could not directly meet – that is to say, German Idealism could emerge only in the
"backward" conditions of a Germany where no political revolution occurred.
In short ... the occurrence of an insurmountable parallax gap, the confrontation of two closely linked
perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible. In a first approach, such a notion of parallax
gap cannot but appear as a kind of Kantian revenge over Hegel: is not "parallax" yet another name for a
fundamental antinomy which can never be dialectically "mediated/sublated" into a higher synthesis, since there is
no common language, no shared ground between the two levels? It is the wager of this book that, far from posing
an irreducible obstacle to dialectics, the notion of the parallax gap provides the key which enables us to discern its
subversive core."
—Slavoj Zizek, Introduction, The Parallax View
Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher and cultural critic. He has published more than thirty books, including in recent years In
Defense of Lost Causes, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, The Universal Exception, and First as
Tragedy, Then as Farce.
Image: Olivier Mosset, Untitled, 2008. Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches (122 x 122 cm)
Miguel Abreu Gallery
36 Orchard Street (between Canal & Hester), New York, NY 10002
Gallery hours: Wednesday – Sunday, 11:00 AM to 6:30 PM
Subway: F to East Broadway; B, D to Grand Street or J, M, Z to Delancey / Essex Street