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Conversion on the Road to Damascus: Minority Report of Artist as Camouflaneur
At the moment when Saul of Tarsus receives the light from Ananais, whose touch, at one and the same time, restores Saul’s blindness and reveals the word of God, Caravaggio’s darker Conversion maps a rather different journey. Here a sliced constellation of factors: narrative, tone, shade, tension, fear, rhythm, smell, voice combine to produce a much more peculiar metamorphosis, one itching with sensuous uncertainty at the very flash of its commanding presence. The Deleuze and Guattarian tongue speak of this as a moment when “God is a lobster” and constellation its “refrain”. Golding and Kennedy’s Conversion on the Road to Damascus revisits Caravaggio’s detour, re-staging its camouflaged assemblage as a suspension of belief systems and, simultaneously, as a recuperation of memory, matter, and libidinal force. Their road points to the beast, the bored, the flaneur of the sacred and profane, one so offhandedly call: art. The prose of Golding’s remarks is landscaped by a music composition arranged and delivered by Kennedy.

(Excerpt from the text by Professor Johnny Golding)

Professor Johnny Golding (b. 1964) holds the Chair in Philosophy of Visual Arts and Communication Technologies at the University of Greenwich and is the Director of their post-graduate programme in Media Arts Philosophy Practice.

Steve Kennedy (b. 1963) is PhD. Cultural Theorist, DJ-composer/musician and Senior Lecturer at the University of Greenwich.

Senka Anastasova (b. 1978) is literary and curatorial theorist and writer. She finished her MA in Philological Sciences in the area of narratology and culture in 2005 and her PhD in Research Studies of Cultural Theory in London in 2005/2006.