Drawing : From Blindness to Evidence/Figures, Doors and Passages.

Outpost 131024

Taking Sides.

On The Phenomena of Vision : From Blindness to Evidence.

The debt at the origin of all drawing.

Derrida in 'Memoirs of the Blind' opens our eyes to this strange filiation, to this sort of conversation or duel between different generations of 'Taking Sides'. It not only teaches us much about blindness, vision, and drawing – about philosophy and art – but leaves us another way to understand the legacy of drawing and vision, the legacy of representation, the legacy of legacy itself.

I have grown to believe that a really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter, for painting requires a certain blindness – a partial refusal to be aware of all the options.

Mrs Talmann, spoken words from The Draughtsman's Contract

It thus will have seen to it to interrupt the legacy of a monocular vision in order to lead us by the hand towards this other legacy that is passed down in darkness. Opening eyes, then, yes – but only in order to cancel them, and to recall that the draughtsman's contract always concerns a pleasure and a condition that are not only out of sight, but out of this world.

Jacques Derrida.

Memoirs of the Blind.

The Self Portrait and Other Ruins.

Witnessing/Testimony/Legacies/Inheritances.

Like a dream, then, of whispering clouds, one can almost hear this obscure communication between past, present, and future, between Derrida and Greenaway, between them and us, between all those 'taking sides' on the other side of vision – in the night.

These are Derrida's themes in 'Memoirs of the Blind'

Blindness, dispropriation and the interruption of a lineage or filiation: the cancellation of what makes representation possible, the difference between the body proper and the supplement, the living body and the scarecrow, and the ruination and death of all foresight, all representation, and all legacies. 

A singular genealogy, a singular illustration of oneself among all these illustrious blind men who keep each other in memory, who greet and recognize one another in the night,

Derrida.

An exhibition ( of selected works) that reflects Derrida's inquiry on vision through the metaphor of blind men and visionaries.

Drawing/Filiations, the relations of one thing to another from which  it is derived or descended.

The Draughtsman's Contract.

Peter Greenaway.

A film about the differences between drawing, painting and sculpture, about allegory and ruin, about masks and funeral monuments, about strategies and debts, optics and blinds, about living statues and sounds represented in drawing. But above all it is about witnessing and testimony, about legacies and inheritances. The very themes of 'Memoirs of the Blind'.

Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael Naas.