Historical Imaginings
University of San Jorge
The Society of the Spectacular: The Social Practice of the Atlanta Arts Collective, 800 East, 1990-1998 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Kilburn
A prequel to the paper presented by this author at the 2020 Arts-in-Society Galway conference (“The democratic praxis of AiOP”), this study is the first academic profile of the obscure but seminal Atlanta arts collective, 800East. Based on participant observation, interviews, and archival research, this ethnography presents a case study of the limits of representation and boundaries of narrative. The group produced hundreds of shows and thousands of visual and performance artworks over its eight year tenure, but it is the overall narrative arch of art as communicative action that comprises its social practice. Established on a sketchy dead-end street in Atlanta’s fourth ward in 1990, 800East quickly became the premier underground arts space in the city for most of the 1990s; an open laboratory for a generation of artists to investigate the nexus of art and life. Working off the grid, with no official status or sponsorship, the collective -by necessity and then conviction- engineered a DIY aesthetic, leveraging goodwill, creative vision, and the hunger of Atlanta’s socially and artistically marginalized communities to foster a safe space for creative exploration. Despite its hardscrabble beginnings, the collective was prolific, producing monthly, large-scale art exhibitions from 1990-1998, as well as a variety of offsite initiatives. Over its eight-year tenure, hundreds of artists exhibited and performed in the space and tens of thousands passed through its gates. By renegotiating local space, responding to community needs, and leveraging local resources, 800East developed a praxis of artistic vision and community engagement with global implications.
One Photograph, Two Pasts, and Three Futures: Georges Bataille’s ‘Lascaux 1940’ View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Philip Charrier
Georges Bataille’s encounter with the Lascaux caves in 1953-54 was an important influence on his late-career thought. Rather than regarding the Upper Paleolithic cave artists as evolutionarily inferior to modern humans, as was the dominant interpretive mode of the era, Bataille looked upon them as utterly unfamiliar beings whose metaphysical footings could not be understood in post-Enlightenment rationalist terms. He was particularly curious about the artists’ animal-centered cosmic universe and believed that the ‘shock’ of confronting this through the experience of the caves could act as a corrective to contemporary humanity’s marginalization and instrumentalization of nature. Bataille also believed that the transformative potential of the caves would decrease over time as they became popular tourist destinations. The following paper analyzes Bataille’s musings on a 1940 group photograph, taken at the entrance of Lascaux, commemorating its discovery. The experience captured in the photograph would never return: the power of first discovery was only available once, with the photograph the only tangible trace of its existence and meaning..
