Synopsis
‘To Plight’ introduces art’s contemporary plight as the split between the promise and the predicament of making-for-art, some of whose consequences are explored across the subsequent texts.
As both verb and noun, ‘plight’ is offered to open up the defining dilemmas of making-for-art now in a global culture of technoscientific representation and knowledge.
To make-for-art, as a becoming-differently, is confronted by rituals of placement and valuing developed both institutionally and rhetorically (as ‘aesthetics’) in systematic institutionally controlled modes of representation. In response and in the wake of the moderns’ legacy, making challenges itself to find, hold to, and disclose its ‘otherness’.
It offers the ‘things’ it generates (gests…) as both diagnoses of its condition and as its promise to make towards the ‘elsewhere’ of Art’s Body.
‘Nisus’, a recurring term across the fiction of Michael Brodsky, is proposed as the web that making seeks to weave as the region of its unnameable species-specific condition.