Art on Terror

Art on Terror: The incendiary device of philosophy is the result of a discussion at Floating ip Gallery, Manchester, addressing the relationships between theory and practice, philosophy and art, after a reading of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's The Man Without Content. Agamben proposes that as art establishes itself as its own a priori, the artist becomes a 'man without content' and the pure inessence of art's principle looms terrifyingly large. Terror here is akin to 'divine terror', a confrontation with the abyss. The danger is not that art is dead, but that it is the 'living dead', surviving its groundless foundations. Under the brilliant fire of such radical theory, how can art transform into new substances rather than be consumed by its own premises and what is said/read becomes a doing?