Cyclical Interpretation and Quotations (Richard A. Cohen)
Cyclical Interpretation
Graphite on paper, metal clips, 100 x 120 cm, 2014-2016
Quotations (Richard A. Cohen)
Book, color pencil, metal clips, approx. 28 x 21 cm, 2014
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During 2013 I spent a lot of time with Zygmunt Bauman's book Postmodern Ethics from 1993. It's a fascinating text in which Bauman examines the anatomy of a possible ethic in a postmodern era that takes a critical position towards the political and ethical rationality of modernity. After writing a few articles on Baumans' thinking I made a diagrammatic and cyclical interpretation of the various stages of power relations and ethical positions that he touches upon in his text which eventually became the drawing ”Cyclical Interpretation”. In the first part of his book Bauman writes extensively about the philosopher Emanuel Levinas' thinking on the ”intimate morality” that occurs in the meeting between two people. When the first version of this drawing was presented at an studio exhibition at Künstlerhaus Lukas in early 2014 I also included a copy of Levinas' book Humanism and the other in the show, with two underlined quotations from the introduction by Richard A. Cohen, an object which forms a diptych with Cyclical Interpretation in the exhibition Make a Change at Ronneby Konsthall.
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Texts about the book at blog.maktverktyg.com (in Swedish)