----- Original Message ----- From: "Greg Ulmer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2005 6:21 AM Subject: Gregori Maiofis
I received a post from an art critic doing a review of an exhibition of the work of Gregori Maiofis. The critic said that during an interview Maiofis said that Applied Grammatology had been an inspiration for some of his work. Asked to comment, I checked out the Website and filed the following paragraphs. fyi glue * Gregory Ulmer * web.nwe.ufl.edu/~gulmer University of Florida ---------- Forwarded message ---------- reviewing www.maiofis-wba.com/web/index.htm >From a grammatological perspective, the art of Gregori Maiofis contributes to the tradition of the search for a universal language, perhaps commenting in general on the ruins or fragmentary survivals of this tradition. The basis for this reading of the oeuvre is the Tarot series, which serves as a key for the other works. Condensing most if not all of the wisdom epistemologies of Western civilization, Tarot in its popular spiritualist form is a remnant of the dream of a perfect language that motivated humanistic thought from Plato to Leibniz. In the eighteenth century this tradition lost credibility and went underground, or was pushed to the margins of culture by the rise of empirical science. The relevance of this tradition for today is what may be learned regarding the capacity of graphic imaging to produce a category system--a metaphysics--that does for digital media what Greek ontology did for alphabetic writing. The prototype for an image metaphysics during the Renaissance was the Egyptian hieroglyph; during the Baroque era it was the Chinese ideogram. However mistaken the understanding of these writing systems may have been, in both cases the result was a major innovation in arts practices (the emblem books, and vorticism, for example). Maiofis's series represent an exploration of atmospheres and moods evoked by image sequences, without the security of a cosmology. We are separated from the star, as Blanchot said in defining this era of dis-aster. Despite the superannuation of cosmology in contemporary knowledge, the astrological categories appropriated by Western wisdom traditions retain their categorical power. The Tarot anchor suggests the potential of an image to locate an archetype in contemporary collective memory, in the absence of any consensus. Maiofis's series are "archeological" in Foucault's sense--an archeology of image knowledge, suggesting the parameters of possible signification. The artists' role, in these conditions that Lyotard called the differend, is to invent new genres, new rules of linking from one node or sign to another, transversally, to map a potential network of relationships from which may emerge an unanticiapted coherence (what Ezra Pound called a vortex). This experiment in invention of genres is well underway in the career of Gregori Maiofis.
