ART WITH CLOSED EYES

For Art with Closed Eyes , some of the world's greatest artists have taken on one of the most difficult challenges of their lives: describing one of their works to a listener who won't see it. They agreed to replace colors with words, energies with sentences, vision with speech. How far can they go? Will they manage to make feel by the virtue of the word the emotions that only vision, normally, communicates to the one who contemplates a work of art? Would they succeed, for example, in bringing a blind person - whether truly or metaphorically - into their universe? Is language, as Roland Barthes asserted, a skin capable of transmitting sensuality as well as desire?  

Art with closed eyes thus offers us an experience at the frontiers of visual arts and language. Because, by suggesting to the artists themselves to describe their work instead of delegating this work to critics, experts and historians, Art with closed eyes breaks a convention: that which requires to feel art instead of commenting on it.

What if the truth of the work lies precisely in this gap between the reality of the work and its very unfaithful transcription into words? What if this device allowed us, in the end, to touch with our fingers, the beating heart, the very soul of the work, that is to say what it has unspeakable?

 

Adrian Ghenie, Joana Vasconcelos Maurizio Catalan, Hervé Di Rosa, Philippe Pasqua, Robert Combas, Bettina Reims, Barthelemy Togo, Daniel Buren and many others participate in this collection of original, innovative and inclusive podcasts.