THE NATURAL LIGHT

"If the Other has no form, the One ceases to exist"
Olu Oguibe ‘In the “Heart of Darkness”’, 1993.

I. THE STUGGLE WITH DARKNESS
The painting, La Négresse, is a case where mystery enters and upsets the Neo-Classic tradition. In the essay Slavery is a Woman James Small discuss the conflicts Benoist and her painting confront within the process and after it's completion.

Unconsciously, the essay itself mirrors a similar conflict and as a result the writing amounts to an and essay with out a clear point improvable, ambiguous article, some even say unacademic. Can we say that in the end, this essay can be said to be a written-academic equivalent of a La Négresse?

The painting and writing like La Négresse are ultimately judged as failures, as the works cancels out it's power by ultimately infusing with that power an equal amount of darkness.

This type of knowledge bundled with it's binary, is unacceptable in academia. That is to say, in academia what matters most is how much you know, not how much you don't.

II. TALK OF UNKNOWLEDGE
A contemporary manifesto would be to :Encourage the Let's talk of what we don't know, or how much we will never know (and by doing so give substance, give power to the darkness).

Similarly, can we superimpose theories of The Other to refer to this type of 'knowledge' and it will still make sense. As The Other (unknowledge) is a vital aspect in defining The Self (knowledge). [citations for The Other needed]

Then can the whole of academia be linked to the same agenda that marked the emergence of science, ethnography, and enlightenment? An agenda said to have been an extension of colonialization as discussed in the essay The Paintings of Egyptian Conquest by Todd Porterfield?

III. What of architecture?
Just look at the way we live and work, and how we are no longer defined by natural light, and even the way in which natural light disturbs our enjoyment of artificial light, the light from our computers, etc.

"[...] Since my previous visits had taken place in the middle of the day, I had noticed the absence of artificial lights in the space. But my perception of the work changed dramatically when the illuminations from the skylights faded. As the room dimmed, surface, color, and detail were taken out of the equation, to be replaced by apprehension of masses, darkly silhouetted in the remaining light, enclosing ambiguous interior spaces. So dramatic was the transformation that the Torqued Ellipses I was experiencing could have been different work." - from Authorship and Authority, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art by Martha Buskirk p. 17

IV. The Contingency of Light in Perception
Hal Fosters contingency of perception in regards to The Natural Light.

V. The Third Element
Enter the 3rd element in to Roland Barthes' Death of the Author: The Writer, the Reader, and the Light. Or in Hal Fosters equation: The Artist, the Viewer, and now the Light...

 

VI. The ObsoleScence of Natural Light
Did we never really want light? Is light that negative force that wakes us from our dreams and says to us it is time to work? That forces us to move from a conscious state to the lawless unconscious? What is her purpose?

"12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto"- Minnesota declaration : truth and fact in documentary cinema, Werner Herzog