Gareth James

Written Component: Thought-Activism and the Poiesis of that Which Is Not. This dissertation devises two philosophical discourses: “Thought-Activism” and Visitor. Thought-activism will be posited as a strategic and an ontological approach to the categories of “language” and “seeing” concerning the formation of a mutually inclusive account for “action” and “thought”, i.e., acting contingent upon thought, and thinking if and only if acting. In short, thought-activism is to be thought of as where the question of “what is to be done?” is bound with that of “what is to be thought?” and vice versa. The subject-figure of the Visitor is a reconfiguration of the category of the art spectator and of the art audience into the encountering subject position of the art Visitor. The subject-figure of the Visitor is the praxis and tactical presentation of the strategy of thought-activism within the fields of art, politics, and critical thinking. The Visitor renders obsolete the characteristic triptych of art, that is artist-artwork-spectator, and subsequently replaces it with the progressive triptych of visitor-object-visitor, which rearticulates the relation that artistic practice occasions on the basis of “encountering.” The key companion thinkers in this exegesis are Alain Badiou and Martin Heidegger.The core question of this exegesis is the contradictory unity of theory and practice formulated under the aegis of the following equation: ‘theoretically-led practice’ equals ‘practically-influenced theory’. Creative Component: Goh Ballet Academy (Shit Yes Academy) ExhibitionGoh Ballet Academy (Shit Yes Academy) was a solo exhibition and publication (itself considered as a part of the exhibition), held at the Ag Galerie of Tehran (Iran) in January of 2019. The exhibition was comprised of a series of photographic and text-based mixed-media objects, a series of sculptural installations, and light-box images, and a publication including essays by myself, Matt Browning, Gareth James and Mohammad Salemy. The publication is attached in the “appendices” section of this dissertation.

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