A touch of violence: Don't even think about it

By Marc Losier

Erin Manning is a joint professor in Studio Arts and Cinema. She teaches courses that combine art practice, politics and philosophy, and she’s also the director of the Sense Lab, aimed at exploring the body in movement in conjunction with art practice, culture, politics and philosophy.

She gave a presentation on March 11 as part of the Defiant Imagination lecture series that explored the relationship between the act of touching and the unknown consequences it presupposes. One can never be sure what to expect when a decision is made to reach out towards someone or something. What or who will come of it?

Reading from her book Erring toward Experience: Violence and Touch, Manning suggested that the most dangerous violence of all is that split second of indecision in which we decide our course of action.

Manning will present an art exhibit in the fall of 2006 entitled “We know not yet what the body can do.”

The Defiant Imagination is a series of talks ranging across the spectrum of the arts, presented by Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

The next event in the series will be this afternoon at 3:30, in the Cummings Auditorium, when art photographer Raymonde April, winner of the Prix Paul-Émile Borduas, presents Passages et bifurcations: travaux récents.

On March 31, Lynn Hughes, Concordia University Research Chair in Studio Arts, will present Quand l’art devient ‘recherche’: ossification ou liberation?

Art is usually seen as an expressive, synthetic practice, while research is analytical, but many artists are beginning to call themselves researchers. Hughes asks if this is desirable, and how New Media have contributed to the phenomenon.

Tomorrow at the MMFA, graduate students in art history from several universities will take part in Art Faces Death: Myth, Memory and Body, which addresses themes from the current MMFA exhibition, Eternal Egypt.

The participating students from Concordia are Ève DeGarie-Lamanque and Luke Nicholson.