As part of our colleague, Mick O’Hara’s exhibition The Prosposition of Objects at Roscommon Arts Centre the Aesthetics Group have recorded a new audio piece that responds to a key quote in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus which is 100 years old this year. The piece considers not only some of the ideas circulating in the quote but considers some of the work presented in the exhibition while also reflecting on the groups own collective practice.
Recording at Firestation Artists Studios
The Proposition of Objects, a newly commissioned exhibition by artist Mick O’Hara, opens 10th August 2021 at Roscommon Arts Centre.
This exhibition is a reflection on the composition and ordering of objects, and their relationship to language. It plays with the ideas of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his belief that there is an inherently logical form existing between objects and words. Before Wittgenstein was a philosopher, he studied aeronautics and as a student designed a model engine that he hoped to build. The work presented here proposes that this model of the engine mediates and intersects with some of the key notions developed in his famous 1921 book, the Tractatus.
The exhibition at Roscommon Arts Centre is a speculation or meditation on what Wittgenstein meant about the relationship between objects and words, their propositions and state of affairs. His model of the engine is re-presented and reimagined in a film as a digital model, existing between language and word yet materialised through the logic of computer code. For Wittgenstein the idea of the model was key as it initiates an idea that language and the world are welded together. According to him, language models or ‘pictures’ the world. Wittgenstein’s engine, a project never fully realised in his lifetime, is presented in a film as a set of digital objects, that are no more or less real than the original designed over a century ago.
Alongside this film work a number of sculptural objects are presented as a set of derivations on this model engine articulated through the machining of steel and brass, a technology available to Wittgenstein at the time. These objects that previously existed as word and thought, now exist as sculptural objects in the world. They suggest a state of affairs exist not only between physical objects and language, but also in their digital counterparts in the imagined or hyper-real space of the machine.
Propositions 1-7
(2021)
The Aesthetics Group will re-perform From A to Z & Back Again as part of the Cloud 9 Pavilion at the Bangkok Biennial on March 31st at 10.00 am Dublin time.
As part of the EARN 2021 conference the Aesthetics Group presented a new work titled ‘The Aesthetics of [dis]play’ on the 29th January 2021.
The presentation was a critical reflection on the recent drive to online exhibitions and the associated aesthetics of display and the politics of the presentable inherent in such online formats. In the current crisis (Covid-19 pandemic), which foregrounds the digital realm as the site of engagement with museum collections, the presentation analysed the crucial role of display in aesthetic experience. In comparison to the exhibition of the digital within the site of museum and works made specifically for delivery online, the fresh terms of access of the current crises have created a different register of ‘performance encounter’ and possibilities of interruption.
A collaboration between Jeanette Doyle and Cathy O’Carroll.
Ekphrastic Fantastic, Bangkok Biennial Cloud 9 Pavilion, curated by Anne Murray January January 21st- February 28th 2021.
https://cloud9pavilion.weebly.com/ekphrastic-fantastic.html
A first reading of an unrealisable script.
Text by Cathy O’Carroll, Performed by Cathy O’Carroll and Jeanette Doyle
At Events, Bangkok Biennial Cloud 9 Pavilion, curated by Anne Murray.
Part 1, Events, October 21st -November 21st 2020
https://cloud9pavilion.weebly.com/anamnesis-script-reading.html
The performance can be viewed here.
The Aesthetics Group were invited to re-perform ‘From A to Z & Back Again’ on June 28th 2020 with the @ac.institute , in New York.
This performance took place on Zoom with a live audience and in the context of lockdown due to the Covid 19 pandemic. It provided a reflection on the idea of live performance within this context while continuing to consider the immaterial and the de-materialized nature of words and image delivered to an international audience online.
The performance is available to watch here
Luke Fallon, “Untitled” 2018.
Simon Critchley (New School for Social Research, What We Think About When We Think About Soccer)
Paul Rouse (University College Dublin, The GAA: A People’s History, Sport and Ireland: A History, The Hurlers)
Sharon O’Connor (20×20) https://20×20.ie/about/
This interdisciplinary conference, scheduled to take place during the 2019 Women’s World Cup and hosted the Dublin School of Creative Arts at Technological University Dublin, focuses on the art and aesthetics of all aspects of football in its various codes. In particular, it explores the aesthetic discourses surrounding football in both its formal and informal practices. The conference will critically analyse the visual culture, performance and rhetoric of the game from perspectives including gender, language, museology and design.
Conference will also include: A screening of Football As Never Before Film in Dalymount Park with live score by Matthew Nolan. Tickets on sale here
Organisers: (Connell Vaughan connellvaughan@dit.ie Mick O’Hara michael.ohara@dit.ie)
Dublin School of Creative Arts (TU Dublin), Grangegorman, Dublin 7. Ireland
As part of the conference The Art of Football that we are hosting in TU Dublin on 4th and 5th of July we have organized the following event. Should be fun. Here is a piece we have written that speaks to the event and the idea of the football icon.
George Best in Dalymount: Football As Never Before (Fußball wie noch nie)
Film Screening with Live Score. July 4th 2019.
Football is working-class ballet. It’s an experience of enchantment. For an hour and a half, a different order of time unfolds and one submits oneself to it. A football game is a temporal rupture with the routine of the everyday: ecstatic, evanescent and, most importantly, shared. At its best, football is about shifts in the intensity of experience. At times, it’s like Spinoza on maximizing intensities of existence. At other times, it’s more like Beckett’s Godot, where nothing happens twice. (Simon Critchley, 2014)
TU Dublin, Bohemian FC and Dublin Business School are delighted to present a rare opportunity to see George Best finally play Dalymount Park in a competitive fixture (Best lined out on the Phibsboro park in a benefit match in August 1968). This is a unique opportunity to see the islands greatest ever player return to the home of Irish football. Best was famously too big for to play Dalymount—in 1968 when the then European Champions, Manchester United, arrived to play League of Ireland champions Waterford, the fixture was moved to Landsdowne Road to accommodate a larger crowd.
In a rare screening of Football As Never Before, released in 1971, the German director Hellmuth Costard used eight 16mm cameras to track Best’s every move during a Saturday league game against Coventry City. Made at the height of Best’s fame and tabloid notoriety, Costard’s film focuses insistently on Best—warming up, looking restless and bored, waiting tactically to unleash his genius—rather than the on-pitch action to arrive at a sublime and revealing rumination on celebrity and a tantalizing glimpse of the man behind the myth. The influence of this film can be felt in Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s well known 2006 variant Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait.
Central to the revival of this film is the work of Matthew Nolan, a Dublin-based musician who has rescued Football As Never Before from obscurity and composed a new score for the film. On July 4th Costard’s film and Nolan’s score will be performed live on Dalymount’s hallowed turf for what promises to be a memorable occasion.
“The sun shone on Old Trafford on 12th September 1970 as Manchester United beat Coventry 2:0 in a league match. It was not an important victory; that season Man Utd would only be also-rans in the race for the championship. But a record was preserved of the match that is probably unique in the history of film and television. Using eight 16mm cameras, Hellmuth Costard, one of the most important experimental filmmakers in German cinema of the 60s and 70s, followed every move over the 90 minutes of the man in the red jersey with the number 11 – traditionally associated with the conventional outside left, but here worn by the mercurial George Best.” (Goethe Institut)
***Note: The screen will be installed on the pitch and patrons will be seated in the Jodi Stand***
Tickets Available through bohemianfc.com
Football As Never Before (Fußball wie noch nie)
As part of our colleague, artist Jeanette Doyle’s, wonderful current exhibition ‘From A to Z & Back Again’ @ac.institute , in New York, the Aesthetics Group performed a new piece of work From A to Z and Back Again which was a response to Doyle’s work. The work continues the groups research which interrogates the aesthetics of language and politics in the digital age. By responding to Doyle’s set of treated digital prints, which referenced each letter of the alphabet, the performance offered a playful critique of the contested nature of words and their constituents. It attempts to play between the relation of the immaterial and the de-materialized nature of words and image, their analogue and digital registers.
The Aesthetics Group performing ‘From A to Z and Back Again,
AC Institute, New York
With thanks to
and the
The Aesthetics Research Group 