Emerging and Revealing: Gestures in Theory, Language and Art

Abstract

The figure of the gesture appears in all sorts of artistic fields and scientific research. While passing through different types of material – physical material like the body, intellectual material like language and visual material like the drawing – what these different gestures unites are certain forms of resistance to a system of meaning. They express forms of being-in-a-medium itself rather than restaging or conveying artistic matters. By that, gestures become figures where the abyss between the pleasure of experiencing art and the impossibility to decode meaning become tangible. Besides containing a (pleasurable) art experience, what they reveal are specific forms of an aporetic character that open up into a field of emergence, where patterns are formed, re-formed and renewed without getting to the point of becoming stable or self-contained. In its hybrid role between material(ity) and (non)meaning, the gesture keeps form itself non-saturable and thus enables not just pleasurable contemplation but a trace towards the enfolded knowledge hidden within art.