Flood a Crevice, Flush a Corner
Fragmentation, Embodiment & Incremental Empathy in Susan Philipsz’s Study For Strings at dOCUMENTA (13)
Dear Reader,
This month I’m sending through a paper on Susan Philipsz. Philipsz’s practice was a hot cornerstone of my research from about 2012-2016, and this paper was written and presented at IMMA as part of research seminar on Art, Memory and Place in 2015. As you’ll see, my focus is Philipsz’s Study for Strings, a site specific and immersive sound work installed at dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012. This was a piece that moved me greatly when I first experienced it with little to no context. Later, when I learned its potent context in full, it moved me more still.
That said, it’s a little amusing to me, now, to reread this piece with its earnest concern with what an artwork can and cannot ‘do’. I once felt a kind of anxiety, I think, around how artworks unfolded in the world and with how I might express that unfolding in words. I still feel earnest from time to time, but mostly when I pursue an artwork’s internal workings. Their palpable effect and capacity to take up worldly space is something I now take very much for granted, and also something I explored in a short story commissioned by BBC Radio 4 in 2021. (It’s called “Ava Unfurled”, and attempted to inhabit the space of certain artworks by Philipsz, Doris Salcedo and Felix Gonzalez-Torres to think about grief and catharsis.)
Thanking you, as always, for reading and for being here.
‘Til soon!
Sue
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