Prairie (Argo)
Kristen Kreider and James O'Leary
Book chapter in Seeing Degree Zero: Barthes/Burgin and Political Aesthetics by Ryan Bishop, Sunil Manghani
Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press (March 2019)
In the fields of literature and the visual arts, 'zero degree' represents a neutral aesthetic situated in response to, and outside of, the dominant cultural order. Taking Roland Barthes’ 1953 book Writing Degree Zero as just one starting point, this volume examines the historical, theoretical and visual impact of the term and draws directly upon the editors’ ongoing collaboration with artist and writer Victor Burgin.
For their contribution to the book, Kreider + O’Leary mobilise Barthes’ image of the Argo as a critical tool through which to contemplate Victor Burgin’s work Prairie (2015). Thus performing the artwork through sequences of writing and image composites, they navigate issues of erasure, resistance and potentiality; the relation between aesthetics and politics; the role that rhythm plays in this and the homogenising impulse of the grid; Whiteness, Blackness, Nativeness; ornament and crime; the importance of story and myth for our conception of the human and for imagining new forms of life. The aim, ultimately, is to suggest how racial and spatial politics together with a complex aesthetic comprising – and combining – aspects of layering, rhythm and figure inform an understanding of the relationship between politics and aesthetics, eventually suggesting new configurations of the social.
See all Kreider + O'Leary Publications here: http://www.kreider-oleary.net/publications/