Dr. phil. in art. John Stroud
Both Sides of the Surface. The Early Performances of Terry Fox
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Michaela Ott
Disputation on 29 June 2022
Remarkable for their quotidian means and specific phenomenological considerations of sound, the process-based methodologies of American artist Terry Fox (1943 - 2008) actively maintained an informed skepticism regarding the then-prevalent historiographic “image” of the concept (popularized as “Conceptual”) in favor of a complex working-out of the nature of Duration. Intuitively corresponding with Deleuzian distinctions of the heterogenesis of Art and Philosophy, Fox lucidly moved beyond considerations of the performative artist-body (wherein Duration was often theatrically or negatively applied) to invoke a revitalization of the object as the bearer of a durational syntax within installation, text based artworks, collaboration, and acoustic performance that not only served as a rejection of the then-fashionable negative-dialectical considerations of the “Art Object” but sought to create (via presenting the “reproduction of experience”) a “sensation of concepts.”
Fox’s select responses to his peers, to literature, and to Art history, when extant, are deeply embedded in his own works and offer opportunities to discuss far-reaching theoretical Contemporary Art issues such as the management of the erasure of difference that accompanies mass production, the mythologizing of trauma as it pertains to identity, to an ecology of sound and images, and perhaps most notably, the much exaggerated extinction of an Avant Garde that currently resides in the technics of our everyday.
It is the intent of this study to explore a host of philosophical concepts as they relate to Fox’s specific artworks and artist’s writings wherein Fox prefigures the emergence of a potential art that can fulfill the promise of Deleuze’s Philosophy of Difference.
Vita:
John Stroud is an Media Artist and Educator currently residing in Ashland, Oregon.
Contact:
stroudjp@icloud.com