the title - spill?

Agnieszka's thoughts on the Maria Magdalena i Pieta are really helpful in making me think again about the exhibition title Spill. We were initially playing with the imperative embedded in speaking the word - the active injunction to perform - to spill one's guts, to tell, reveal, divulge, leak, ooze... At the same time, involvement in a physical spill (handwept glass onto the floor) generates another kind of involuntary, adrenal response. Both senses of the word evoking liquid, fluid metaphors - something difficult to bind or contain; escaping at the edges.

In Agnieszka's words the Magdalena is linked to 'the generation of collective affective practices of resurrection (of which most notable is absolving) and ascension (of which most significant is the reunion)'. This brings me back to the sense of Spill as confession, which is in part about reconciling an interior, personal experience with an exterior, collective one; a personal and community absolution, bringing experience (and affect) into the realm of the shared and agreed upon...

The context of confession then is a useful one for thinking about what we have been calling 'scale' in relation to affect: the relationship between personal, embodied experience and broader social, political understandings or productions of affect.

Jill Greenberg's images of crying children, referred to by Agnieszka, are another useful example here, in pointing to the artist's mistake of assuming to know the dominant (or seemingly universal) affect to be generated in the viewer by the image of the crying child. The unease caused by Greenberg's photographs point instead to the multiple registers of distress these images provoked, and that knowledges of the 'child' are deeply imbricated with other discourses concerning a fear of being seen to feel - to take pleasure or other benefit - from children (exploited or otherwise). These involve too the well-circulated media anxieties concerning child pornography and the role of technology in allowing disguise or distancing of the realities of (especially child) exploitation. The point then, I think, is to keep thinking about the (inextricable) connections of bodily, perceptual response and other social, cultural and historical layerings of difference.