AAP2010 Abstracts


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Title Dr.
First Name Mireille
Surname Astore
Institution University of Sydney
Title of Paper Tradition versus Nostalgia: On Surpassing Disasters and Empty Deserts
Select a Stream Aesthetics
Abstract In this paper, I will elucidate Jalal Toufic’s theory "The “Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster” through my artwork “3494 Houses + 1 Fence.” Devised and explicated in the books “Forthcoming” (Berkeley, California: Atelos, 2000) and “Distracted” (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1991) Toufic’s theory is primarily concerned with how artists as institutional bearers of tradition propagate tradition following the detection of a “surpassing disaster.” Here for example artworks by Fiona Foley, Mark Minchinton and my own, signify not only an inherent intention to point to a "surpassing disaster" but more importantly, a perceived need to suspend transmission and a refusal to hand down counterfeit culture. “What is indecent is not speaking about the surpassing disasters of the atomic devastation of Hiroshima, the Rwandan genocide, Auschwitz, the Khmer Rouge 1974-1977 rule in Cambodia, the genocidal US-imposed UN sanctions on Iraq; but any implied attendant disregard of the consequent withdrawal” (Toufic: 2000, 70). Of significance, is the fact that this withdrawal takes place at a moment in history when a surpassing disaster is no longer capable of being delineated for “Tradition is not merely what materially and ostensibly survived ‘the test’ of time…. Tradition is what conjointly materially survived the surpassing disaster, was immaterially withdrawn by it, and had the fortune of being subsequently resurrected by artists, writers and thinkers” (46). This topology, however, is not simply a negation of nostalgia. As a separator of humans and events, nostalgia is considered rather as inertia and a measure of the will. “The perfect does not induce nostalgia” (77) for had an event been contemporaneously perfect, it would have been willed enough to pass and hence not be recalled. Toufic’s theory on tradition overarches epochal differences while collapsing transmission and reception.