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Praxis of potentiality: A consideration of spatial disappearance

Lent is a practicing artist with an on-going engagement with critical theory, His chapter, 'Praxis of Potentiality: A consideration of spatial disappearance', examines disappearance into representation between space and place as a shortcoming in the process of knowing. This text extends Baudrillard’s notion of disappearance and Husserl’s theory of adumbration, whilst re-evaluating de Certeau’s idea of ‘practising space’. Here, Lent sets forth an exploratory method of research through which artists might uncover a moment of transition, without causing further dissolution. The text examines works that connect the Latin word umbrare, meaning to cast a shadow, with an aesthetic experience described by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki and Robert Irwin and linked with a phenomenology of experience through Merleau-Ponty. This chapter speculates about a tentative methodology which artistic practice might further employ. These ideas have been crucial to Lent’s visual research and this chapter provides access to these theories for other artists who might develop similar concerns as well as forms a basis for understanding his research.

Lent’s contribution is described by the editor in the introduction to this book:

"Michael Lent ... outline(s) projects involving moving images of space and place. Lent’s work reengages with Baudrillard’s account of an accelerating dystopia of space and place by reminding us of Husserl’s phenomenology of objects and their penumbral “adumbrations.” Not where such objects are lost but found, this obscurity that enables only partially able perception also provokes practices of space, as he argues, following the work of Michel de Certeau, revisionist theorist of flaneurism. Lent takes this back to the problem of belief in certain knowledge of places, their limits and perdurance, drawing us closer to an experience of multi- projection video that invites imaginaries of phasal histories of place and pleasure in space."