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Pissed Ink

Peter Spiers

2 – 17 November 2012

Building on previous research, this new body of work takes the relationship between empathy and aesthetic engagement to new modes of extreme production. By an act of performative mark-making, traces are created by discharging ink from the body through the urethra. This immediate and most primitive form of mark-making exists as a trigger for both aesthetic appreciation and empathic revulsion.

The Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin compared the aesthetic act to that of an act of empathy, in that both are acts committed in the answerable world of Being, but the product of those acts is abstracted from our lived being. With these Pissed Ink works, we are asked to consider the performative trace as a bridge between the act and the product.