October 6, 2014

Lyman Hall, Room 211

Weather Patterns or How Minor Gestures Entertain the Environment

A weather pattern: the smell of red.

A minor gesture: the force of form that makes a work work.

How do weather patterns qualitatively alter the field of experience?

What are the minor gestures of weather patterns in the making?

Proposition: minor gestures trouble institutional frameworks in the same way they trouble existing forms of value. This is their potential: they open the artistic process beyond the matter-form of its object, beyond the prestige value that comes with all of the artistic conclusions that surround us. The minor gesture is the felt experience of potential, the force that makes felt how a process is never about an individual, but about the ecology it calls forth, its weather pattern.

Erin Manning holds the University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada).