Hayon, Adi Louria
Junior Fellow: November 2016–January 2017 and July–September 2017
Research Project: From Descartes’ Doubt to Bruce Nauman’s Sensual Praxis
Adi Louria Hayon’s research project centres on the relationship between modern art and philosophy, in particular on how we may consider the art of American artist Bruce Nauman through René Descartes’ methodological scepticism. The question at hand is whether post-minimalist art may offer a systematic process akin to methodological scepticism in order to afford us an insight into the questions of the existence of external reality and the finite nature of objective knowledge. Allying himself with the sceptic, from the late 1960s Nauman began developing a practice that exposes the contraptions of sense perception through a series of methods that include the impediment of visual apparatuses, failures, blinding mechanisms, chance operations, and a turn to the sonorous, a sense considered minor in the plastic arts. Focusing on the nature of knowledge and its production, this project will address the issue of methodic doubt by investigating the concepts of anamorphic images and distortions in relation to the operation of perspective and the problem of illusionism; the concept of self-deception in relation to technology and instrumentality; and the concept of suspension of judgment as a solution to the enactment of false knowledge and a threat to freedom.
Adi Louria Hayon is an assistant professor in the Art History Department at Tel Aviv University. She earned her doctorate at University of Toronto in 2013.