Tag: Kunsthaus Graz

A Look in the Mirror #2: More Loopy Loonies

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

by Andrea Scrima

For the past ten years, Andrea Scrima has been working on a group of drawings entitled LOOPY LOONIES. The result is a visual vocabulary of splats, speech bubbles, animated letters, and other anthropomorphized figures that take contemporary comic and cartoon images and the violence imbedded in them as their point of departure. Against the backdrop of world political events of the past several years—war, pandemic, the ever-widening divisions in society—the drawings spell out words such as NO (an expression of dissent), EWWW (an expression of disgust), OWWW (an expression of pain), or EEEK (an expression of fear). The morally critical aspects of Scrima’s literary work take a new turn in her art and vice versa: a loss of words is countered first with visual and then with linguistic means. Out of this encounter, a series of texts ensue that explore topics such as the abuse of language, the difference between compassion and empathy, and the nature of moral contempt and disgust. 

Part I of this project can be seen and read HERE

Part II of this project can be seen and read HERE

Part III of this project can be seen and read HERE

Images from the exhibition LOOPY LOONIES at Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, can be seen HERE

 

Andrea Scrima, LOOPY LOONIES. Series of drawings 35 x 35 each, graphite on paper. Exhibition view: Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, June 2024.

10. AWWW

I look at you and offer an encouraging smile: it’s an awkward moment. You tell me of your suffering and I feign compassion. I feel my face subtly shift as it transforms into its own mask: eyes slightly widened, brow furrowed, I gaze back at you in simulated empathy. Seated opposite me, you are stripped bare; you expose your weakness. Then something in you collects itself, grows cautious, alert suddenly to the spectacle of your unprotected state and your own vulnerable self and my detached vantage as I coolly view you. You excuse yourself, embarrassed; I assure you that there is no need for apologies.

We praise people for enduring their pain in silence; admiringly, we say that they never complain. But do we consider their loneliness as they spare us the obligation of expressing sympathy, of imagining ourselves in their place? Surely we wish no harm; surely our response is sincere: we would do anything to alleviate their suffering, or so we believe. We think of Schadenfreude as a despicable character trait. We wince at the sight of physical injury, the display of the self unraveled, unable to maintain its composure, its dignity and pride. But we are also curious, absorbed by an almost scientific interest. Finally, we give in to our fascination—so these are the symptoms of a body as it breaks down; these are the utterances of a mind as it falls apart. Safe in our perch of good health, we observe the soul in all its nakedness as it watches its future shrink before it, dissolve into the vanishing point of an unknown horizon. Read more »

Sunday, March 16, 2025

A Look in the Mirror

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

MORE LOOPY LOONIES BY ANDREA SCRIMA

For the past ten years, Andrea Scrima has been working on a group of drawings entitled LOOPY LOONIES. The result is a visual vocabulary of splats, speech bubbles, animated letters, and other anthropomorphized figures that take contemporary comic and cartoon images and the violence imbedded in them as their point of departure. Against the backdrop of world political events of the past several years—war, pandemic, the ever-widening divisions in society—the drawings spell out words such as NO (an expression of dissent), EWWW (an expression of disgust), OWWW (an expression of pain), or EEEK (an expression of fear). The morally critical aspects of Scrima’s literary work take a new turn in her art and vice versa: a loss of words is countered first with visual and then with linguistic means. Out of this encounter, a series of texts ensue that explore topics such as the abuse of language, the difference between compassion and empathy, and the nature of moral contempt and disgust. 

Part I of this project can be seen and read HERE

Part II of this project can be seen and read HERE

Images from the exhibition LOOPY LOONIES at Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, can be seen HERE

 
Andrea Scrima, LOOPY LOONIES. Series of drawings 35 x 35 each, graphite on paper; edition of postcards with text excerpts. Exhibition view: Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, June 2024.

7. EEEK

Michel de Montaigne’s famous statement—“The thing I fear most is fear”—remains, nearly five hundred years later, thoroughly modern. We think of fear as an illusion, a mental trap of some kind, and believe that conquering it is essential to our personal well-being. Yet in evolutionary terms, fear is an instinctive response grounded in empirical observation and experience. Like pain, its function is self-preservation: it alerts us to the threat of very real dangers, whether immediate or imminent.

Fear can also be experienced as an indistinct existential malaise, deriving from the knowledge that misfortune inevitably happens, that we will one day die, and that prior to our death we may enter a state so weak and vulnerable that we can no longer ward off pain and misery. We think of this more generalized fear as anxiety: we can’t shake the sense that bad things—the vagueness of which render them all the more frightening—are about to befall us. The world is an inherently insecure and precarious place; according to Thomas Hobbes, “there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because life it selfe is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Fear” (Leviathan, VI). Day by day, we are confronted with circumstances that justify a response involving some degree of entirely realistic and reasonable dread and apprehension, yet anxiety is classified as a psychological disorder requiring professional therapeutic treatment. Read more »

Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Andrea Scrima’s LOOPY LOONIES At Kunsthaus Graz, Museum Joanneum, Austria Part II

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

by Andrea Scrima

Part I of this is here.

#4: OWWW                                                                                      

SPEECH BUBBLE, Andrea Scrima. Graphite on paper, 35 x 35 cm. From the drawing series LOOPY LOONIES

Pain is a private experience that happens within an individual body; it is internal and essentially invisible. As much as we might commiserate, we cannot “share” another’s pain; we can merely witness the behavior it induces, inquire into the nature of the pain, and try to help alleviate it.

A medical diagnosis depends on a precise description. Is the pain aching, searing, shooting? Does it prick, stab, sting, or throb—or does it gnaw, tingle, cramp, burn? Is it sharp or dull? Asked to evaluate the intensity of their pain on a scale of one to ten, patients often find themselves at a loss. It hurts, they say. It’s unbearable. Pain is one of the least communicable human experiences.

Pain is also a weapon: power is asserted through violence, in other words, through causing pain. War’s objective is to shoot, burn, blast, and otherwise annihilate human flesh and to damage or destroy objects human beings regard as extensions of themselves: their homes, their possessions, photographs of loved ones, the buildings they live in, their religious and cultural institutions—and often entire cities, along with the history preserved in their architecture, in their libraries, museums, archives. War aims to not merely seize territory and take control, but to induce pain—and to make that pain visible to demoralize its victims, rob them of their voice, their individuality, their humanity.

Foucault described the process whereby the public execution—historically staged as entertainment for the masses—gradually became obsolete. In the practice of extrajudicial torture, however, the spectacle lives on. While the interrogation-induced confession is presented as torture’s justification, incriminating information obtained under duress is generally deemed unreliable or worthless. The infliction of pain serves a different purpose: torture becomes a ceremony, a form of clandestine theater where coercion and admission of guilt merge in a ritual whose power is rooted in secrecy. Read more »

Monday, June 3, 2024

Andrea Scrima’s LOOPY LOONIES At Kunsthaus Graz, Museum Joanneum, Austria

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

by Andrea Scrima

#1: SAYING NO

NO, Andrea Scrima. Graphite on paper, 35 x 35 cm. From the drawing series LOOPY LOONIES

In the talk Judith Butler gave upon receiving the Adorno Prize in 2012, she asks: “Can one lead a good life in a bad life?” Her question springs from a conclusion Theodor W. Adorno formulated in Minima Moralia: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” (“Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen”). Years later, he speculated whether modern humans were already too damaged to live in a right world, should such a world ever come into being. Butler nonetheless asks if it’s morally permissible to “wish simply to live a good life in the midst of a bad life,” but concedes that it’s not so simple. It would seem that to pursue the “good” life, one must reject the “bad” life and everything it demands from us. Yet isn’t the term “the good life” already far too tainted by consumerism to be of any real use?

Let’s speak instead of a “true life” as opposed to a “false life.” But what is the nature of this undertaking, and what would the true life entail? The fact that we are interdependent and vulnerable beings presupposes a set of conditions required for even a minimally decent life: food, shelter, clothing, a halfway functioning society, some kind of livelihood. Butler reminds us of Hannah Arendt’s observation that it’s not enough to be alive, to merely survive—that for a life to be considered a life, it has to be lived with meaning and purpose.

Thus, our demand must be not merely for life, but for a liveable life. And yet our lives are not entirely in our hands; they are subject to political and economic structures that rob individuals and entire peoples of their agency and doom them to precarity, and often worse. In Problems of Moral Philosophy, Butler reminds us, Adorno asks “how the broader operations of power and domination enter into, or disrupt, our individual reflections on how best to live.” Read more »