All Art is Political

all painting could be considered abstract, in that all painting is about the distribution of shapes and colours on a surface. Painting is not a collection of signs that point towards language. It’s like a word without a synonym – you can’t look it up in a dictionary, you have to find its meaning within the painting itself.22

perhaps gesturing towards that point of historical rupture that Walter Benjamin described, when human experience of sensuous correspondences (mimetic production and comprehension) passed over into the medium of language, ‘a medium into which the earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of magic’.

faith or a sexual attraction – an aesthetic echo’.12

The way in which the works of Ruscha, Burden, and Smithson bridged semiotics and phenomenology fuelled Richard’s interest in how art could be felt through an emotion ‘presenting some analogy with a religious

painted wood, plaster and clay, but they also demarcated a kind of clearing for the practice of prayer, sleep and dreaming. The addition of the carpets to Djordjadze’s existing vocabulary of forms provides another means of highlighting the unique properties of the handmade object. The carpets are portraits of the material conditions in which they were made – the colours depend on the local dyes, the length and width on the branches cut to make the loom, and variations in the pattern may reflect human error.

carpets used by Djordjadze in ‘Endless Enclosure’ functioned as soft supports for her sculptures made of paint

Mikhail Kalatozov’s propaganda film Salt for Svanetia (1930)

Djordjadze’s installation Possibility, Nansen (2007) at Studio Voltaire, a non-profit space in London. Djordjadze covered the floor of the gallery in salt, a material that can preserve, protect against decay and sustain life. The use of salt in this context, as Dan Fox observed, lent the sculptures in the exhibition ‘an antedulivian quality […] as if these were totems of prehistory or shamanistic talismans’.

Djordjadze’s use of the medium of coffee grinds as a means of fortune telling is a literal reversal of Walter Benjamin’s assertion that ‘the observable world of modern man contains only minimal residues of the magical correspondences and analogies that were familiar to ancient peoples […] The question is whether we are concerned with the decay of this faculty or with its transformation’.12

Beuys’s work offered a potent example of performance as a vehicle for probing the limitations of language, and influenced Djordjadze’s growing interest in the possibilities offered by sculpture and performance, as opposed to painting.