Program for session 3.2

The idea of this session is to discuss different concepts of artist's subjectivity and i am really looking forward very much to tie up to the great spirit of the first session two weeks ago.

THEORY KIT 2

5.-8.2.2007
Portrait: configurations of the self and strategies of mirroring

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 6

14:00 Art&architecture space
Collaborative reading

"The author function" by Michel Foucault, excerpt from the 1977 work, "What is an Author?"

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7

10:00 Art&architecture space
"Self portrait in a convex mirror"

In this session we will have a look at two artworks with the same title: "Self portrait in a convex mirror". The first one is a small painting by Renaissance artist Francesco Parmegianino painted on a convex piece of poplar wood, probably in 1523/24. The second one is a famous postmodern poem by John Ashbery, written in 1973/74. "The Francesco Parmigianino's celebrated anamorphic self-portrait becomes, as the object of elaborately digressive meditation, a skewed representation of a skewed representation. This itself comprises, in its intense mimetic function, another sort of figurative mirror in which the self-portrait of the artist generates an image of the poet at work, and thereby of anyone at the rest of life." (John Hollander: The Gazer's Spirit).

Movie Screening
19:30 Art&architecture space

Ghosts (Gespenster), Germany 2005

Director: Christian Petzold, Screenplay: Christian Petzold · Harun Farocki with Julia Hummer, Sabine Timoteo, Marianne Basler, Aurélien Recoing, Benno Fürmann

Françoise keeps going back to Berlin. Each time, she hopes to somehow find her daughter who was stolen there years ago. Her compassionate husband Pierre has once again come to patiently stand by her. Nina is a vulnerable girl, alone in the world except for the social workers at the home for problem teenagers. She finds an ally in reckless Toni, a tough young woman who grabs what she wants to survive. Together they experience a fleeting moment of intimacy, an instant of happiness. During her desperate search across the city, Françoise comes across Nina. The resemblance is uncanny. She has the same scar on her ankle...

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8

10:00 - 18:00
Studiovisits

Michel Foucault on the "Author Function"

How does the name of the author (or the rational entity we call an author) function? According to Foucault the "author function" is more like a set of beliefs or assumptions governing the production, circulation, classification and consumption of texts. How relevant is this concept of authorship for contemporary art production?

From Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. pp. 124-127.

In dealing with the "author" as a function of discourse, we must consider the characteristics of a discourse that support this use and determine its differences from other discourses. If we limit our remarks only to those books or texts with authors, we can isolate four different features.

First, they are objects of appropriation; the form of property they have become is of a particular type whose legal codification was accomplished some years ago. It is important to notice, as well, that its status as property is historically secondary to the penal code controlling its appropriation. Speeches and books were assigned real authors, other than mythical or important religious figures, only when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse was considered transgressive. In our culture and undoubtably in others as well discourse was not originally a thing, a product, or a possession, but an action situated in a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful and unlawful, religious and blasphemous. It was a gesture charged with risks before it became a possession caught in a circuit of property values. But it was at the moment when a system of ownership and strict copyright rules were established (toward the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century) that the transgressive properties always intrinsic to the act of writing became the forceful imperative of literature. It is as if the author, at the moment he was accepted into the social order of property which governs our culture, was compensating for his new status by reviving the older bipolar field of discourse in a systematic practice of transgression and by restoring the danger of writing which, on another side, had been conferred the benefits of property.

Secondly, the "author-function" is not universal or constant in all discourse. Even within our civilization, the same types of texts have not always required authors; there was a time when those texts which we now call "literary" (stories, folk tales, epics and tragedies) were accepted, circulated and valorized without any questions about the identity of their author. Their anonymity was ignored because their real or supposed age was a sufficient guarantee of their authenticity. Text, however, that we now call "scientific" (dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine or illness, the natural sciences or geography) were only considered truthful during the Middle Ages if the name of the author was indicated. Statements on the order of "Hippocrates said..." or "Pliny tells us that..." were not merely formulas for an argument based on authority; they marked a proven discourse. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a totally new conception was developed when scientific texts were accepted on their own merits and positioned within an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of established truths and methods of verification. Authentication no longer required reference to the individual who had produced them; the role of the author disappeared as an index of truthfulness and, where it remained as an inventor's name, it was merely to denote a specific theorem or proposition, a strange effect, a property, a body, a group of elements, or a pathological syndrome.

At the same time, however, "literary" discourse was acceptable only if it carried an author's name; every text of poetry or fiction was obliged to state its author and the date, place, and circumstance of its writing. The meaning and value attributed to the text depended upon this information. If by accident or design a text was presented anonymously, every effort was made to locate its author. Literary anonymity was of interest only as a puzzle to be solved as, in our day, literary works are totally dominated by the sovereignty of the author. (Undoubtedly, these remarks are far too categorical. Criticism has been concerned for some time now with aspects of a text not fully dependent upon the notion of an individual creator; studies of genre or the analysis of recurring textual motifs and their variations from a norm ther than author. Furthermore, where in mathematics the author has become little more than a handy reference for a particular theorem or group of propositions, the reference to an author in biology or medicine, or to the date of his research has a substantially different bearing. This latter reference, more than simply indicating the source of information, attests to the "reliability" of the evidence, since it entails an appreciation of the techniques and experimental materials available at a given time and in a particular laboratory).

The third point concerning this "author-function" is that it is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. Undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a "realistic" dimension as we speak of an individual's "profundity" or "creative" power, his intentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing. Nevertheless, these aspect of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice. In addition, all these operations vary according to the period and the form of discourse concerned. A "philosopher" and a "poet" are not constructed in the same manner; and the author of an eighteenth-century novel was formed differently from the modern novelist.

A Visual Economy of Individuals

On his homepage Andreas Broeckmann, director of the new media festival transmediale, has published the study "A Visual Economy of Individuals: The Use of Portrait Photography in the Nineteenth-Century Human Sciences". It is the revised version of the PhD thesis written for the
University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, 1995
http://isp2.srv.v2.nl/~andreas/phd/

This study investigates the uses of portrait photography in the nineteenth-century sciences of Anthropology, Psychiatry, and Criminal Anthropology, and discusses these practices in relation to applications of photography in Criminalistics, and to the portraits made by high street photographers. The main examples for these photographic practices are taken from various European countries, including France, Britain, Germany, Austria, and Italy, and are discussed and compared in their respective social, historical, and scientific contexts. Among the sources which are being examined are the British manual Notes & Queries and the works of Gustav Fritsch in Anthropology, the writings of John Conolly, Henri Legrand du Saulle and other psychiatrists, the publications and collections of criminologists like Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Ferri, and Alexandre Lacassagne, and the literature on Alphonse Bertillon’s system of police photography. Other material under discussion includes the publications of Paul Broca, Charles Darwin, A. A. E. Disdéri, Francis Galton, Henry P. Robinson, and the influential French photographer Albert Londe.
The study assesses recent contributions to the historiography of scientific representation and seeks to re-evaluate the significance of photography in the period between 1850 and 1900. It is argued that the epistemological status of photographs hinged on the emotive impact they had on the observer. Ultimately, it was the latter's subjective reaction that served to affirm the status of objectivity of the representations. Simultaneously, the observer's subjectivity itself was articulated by the practices involved in the use of portrait photographs. The dispositif photographique thus served to constitute a visual economy of individuals which contributed to the affirmation of social positions and a distinct sense of self for the social agents.

Gespenster (Ghosts) Links

Ghosts (Gespenster), Germany 2005

Director: Christian Petzold
Screenplay: Christian Petzold and Harun Farocki
Cast: Julia Hummer, Sabine Timoteo, Marianne Basler, Aurélien Recoing, Benno Fürmann 

"The filmmaker Jacques Rivette once wrote that the only justification for art is that it attempts to make people a little less blind, a little less deaf and a little less dumb. In this sense, cinema is like the other arts; one knows that leaves blow in the wind but suddenly, one sees it..."
http://www.signandsight.com/features/375.html

Françoise keeps going back to Berlin. Each time, she hopes to somehow find her daughter who was stolen there years ago. Her compassionate husband Pierre has once again come to patiently stand by her. Nina is a vulnerable girl, alone in the world except for the social workers at the home for problem teenagers. She finds an ally in reckless Toni, a tough young woman who grabs what she wants to survive. Together they experience a fleeting moment of intimacy, an instant of happiness. During her desperate search across the city, Françoise comes across Nina. The resemblance is uncanny. She has the same scar on her ankle...
http://www.gespenster-der-film.de/html/synopsis_en.html

Interview with Christian Petzold on "Gespenster"

-> Interview Hans Fromm -> Interview Bettina Böhler

Where did the idea for ‘Ghosts’ come from?

At the end of the 90’s, I read Rave, by Rainald Goetz, and a novel by Pavese, about a couple of artists who bring two proletarian girls into their studio as models. The girls spend the summer there and become slightly infected by the artistic atmosphere. When the summer is over and the artists follow the light to North Africa, leaving the girls behind, the girls fall completely apart. The first exposé developed out of these two books, the Pavese, and Rave, which takes place during the early days of the Love Parade scene. Back then, nobody was interested. Later I told Julia Hummer, with whom I made The State I Am In, about my story and she found it interesting. In the autumn of 2000, we were flying to a film festival – in London, I think – and I gave her the first twenty pages of a different story, one I’d written with Harun Farocki, about a French woman looking for her daughter in Berlin. So you might almost say, Julia and I together developed that story further on that flight to London. Then Harun Farocki had the idea of putting both stories together.

One has the feeling that there is something ‘ghostlike’ about all the characters in your film …

It’s an interesting effect ... When a film starts with two girls coming home from school, throwing their schoolbags in the corner and going off for ice cream, then they have an immediate social definition. But the girls played by Sabine Timoteo and Julia Hammer are different; they don’t have homes or a place to define them; no social definition. They are, as I explained to them, in a sort of bubble. They want to go to a casting call because they want to be seen. They want to have an identity, and they can’t identify with doing an apprenticeship or anything like that ... This ‘living in a bubble’, the effort of trying to establish contact with so-called ‘life’, that’s what this film is about. And the effect is that the other characters who come into contact with the girls suddenly don’t seem to have terrific, normal lives either – suddenly it’s not only the two girls who are unable to be part of normal life. The girls reveal the rest of the world as also being a bubble; they take it apart. You get the feeling that wherever they are, just a metre beside them ... it’s not normality, but rather the beginning of the next ‘ghost (twilight) zone’. I don’t know whether that will be the effect film will have, but considering what I’ve seen so far, I think we’re on the right track.