----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Stirling Newberry: "The space also has differing viewpoints, as does every
individual viewer. Art in situ is, too some extent, illusory."
In his essay, "Reality and its Shadow, " Levinas is suspicious of art as
monstrously inhuman because it is trapped in the stasis of a "Meanwhile"
that does not come to pass. He says that "art is the falling movement on
the hither side of time, into fate." In his reading, the haunted
temporality of the image—that is neither in the moment, nor has any
future—is trapped in stasis. Levinas lists non-plastic arts, "music,
literature, theater and cinema," that too do not escape the shadow of the
meanwhile. For Levinas, the meanwhile is an "eternal duration of the
interval" and it is Art that brings about just this duration in the
interval, where the shadow of reality is immobilized.
In my rereading of the meanwhile in Levinas's through its shadow, I
propose that the relation between art and art in remediation as the
meeting of shadows and shadows. If the shadow is reality's parallel
possibility where reality's nonexistence is discovered, Levinas's work
could be read as a philosophy of the shadow that haunts the visible.
In a chapter of my book project, I read the rhythm in Levinas's oeuvre
between belief in vertical transcendence and the turns to darkness
alongside the acts of substitution that link the intervals of reality and
the shadow of art through the late 1990s textures of the Bangkok alley in
In the Mood for Love and the remediation of *In the Mood for Love*, by
Singapore artist Ming Wong in an installation 'In Love for the Mood."
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