CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Part of a Book (303)
- Article (150)
- Part of Periodical (24)
- Working Paper (17)
- Book (9)
- Conference Proceeding (7)
- Report (7)
- Review (7)
- Lecture (2)
- Preprint (2)
Language
- English (528) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (528)
Keywords
- Rezeption (33)
- Dante Alighieri (23)
- Literatur (23)
- Übersetzung (20)
- Benjamin, Walter (19)
- Erzähltheorie (19)
- Film (19)
- Geschichte (19)
- Productive reception (18)
- Pasolini, Pier Paolo (17)
Institute
- Extern (16)
- Neuere Philologien (2)
- MPI für empirische Ästhetik (1)
In light of the dramatic growth and rapid institutionalization of human-animal studies in recent years, it is somewhat surprising that only a small number of publications have proposed practical and theoretical approaches to teaching in this inter- and transdisciplinary field. Featuring eleven original pedagogical interventions from the social sciences and the humanities as well as an epilogue from ecofeminist critic Greta Gaard, the present volume addresses this gap and responds to the demand by both educators and students for pedagogies appropriate for dealing with environmental crises. The theoretical and practical contributions collected here describe new ways of teaching human-animal studies in different educational settings and institutional contexts, suggesting how learners - equipped with key concepts such as agency or relationality - can develop empathy and ethical regard for the more-than-human world and especially nonhuman animals. As the contributors to this volume show, these cognitive and affective goals can be achieved in many curricula in secondary and tertiary education. By providing learners with the tools to challenge human exceptionalism in its various guises and related patterns of domination and exploitation in and outside the classroom, these interventions also contribute to a much-needed transformation not only of today's educational systems but of society as a whole. This volume is an invitation to beginners and experienced instructors alike, an invitation to (re)consider how we teach human-animal studies and how we could and should prepare learners for an uncertain future in, ideally, a more egalitarian and just multispecies world.
A small, blind-tooled volume sits on a table covered in green baize: one clasp is open, the other is closed; and a slip of paper emerges from it reading 'Veritas odium parit' ('truth breeds hatred'). This detail occurs in the foreground of a portrait by Hans Holbein of a young man identified as the Cologne patrician Hermann von Wedigh III (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). A study of the physical features of the book and of the history of the brief text - actually an ancient and then Erasmian adage - leads to a new interpretation of the painting in the context of humanist friendship. The book is seen to be a multivalent simile for the work of art authored by the artist as well as for the sitter himself, raising questions about the implications for these of a medium that can be opened and closed. The half-open condition of the book is understood to reflect the complementary pressures of openness and closedness, accessibility and intimacy, that characterized the Renaissance republic of letters.
This article draws on the nearly 1800 letters which survive from the Benedictine convent of Lüne, near Lüneburg in northern Germany, and were written between c. 1460 and 1555. It explores the textual and visual strategies which nuns in the later Middle Ages used to negotiate their enclosed status. It suggests that the language and imagery of openness were a means for the nuns to remind those outside the convent wall of their presence and purpose in life.
The monastic enclosure
(2022)
The moral and physical enclosure of monks and nuns is central to the founding documents of Western monasticism. But even there it encountered the need for monasteries to interact with their societies, through recruits, hospitality, and the monastic economy. The increasing intensity of this tension is traced through key reforming texts, until later English visitations open up religious houses to closer scrutiny, ironically aided by inmates' quandary over whether to conceal or reveal their secrets.
This essay follows the productive discussion of Giorgio Agamben's "The Open: Man and Animal" that took place as part of the 'Openness in Medieval Culture' conference at the ICI Berlin. The essay attempts to develop a speculative notion of openness within Agamben's work, in particular by connecting the question of openness to the question of the promise: the promise of the resolution of the question of man and animal ("The Open"); the promise of the Franciscans' vow, or 'sacramentum' ("The Highest Poverty"); and the promise of language ("The Sacrament of Language").
Openness and intensity : Petrarch's becoming laurel in "Rerum vulgarium fragmenta" 23 and 228
(2022)
Our paper offers a comparative reading of Rvf 23 and 228, which describe the poetic subject's transformation into (23), or implantation with (228), the laurel tree that normally represents the poet's beloved, Laura. Bringing Petrarch's poems into dialogue with philosophical works that consider the nature of plant existence as a form of interconnectedness and porosity to the outside, we argue that the becoming tree these poems stage is a form of desire to be understood not as lack but as intensity.
Practices of rewriting and mouvance are central to medieval culture, but have been neglected by contemporary scholarship. This paper highlights how collaborative forms of writing such as religious song engage with complex theological thought, opening up a discourse from which the laity had previously been excluded. Using forms which defy conventional author-based aesthetic norms, these songs explore poetic practices which are both collective and inclusive.
In "The Book of Margery Kempe", the protagonist shifts between identities and geographies as a nomadic subject, dispersed across compassionate responses to violence that unusually include a recognition of animal suffering. The "Life" of Christina the Astonishing also seizes on the nonhuman aspects of extreme affective experience as her bodily transformations participate in a process of becoming animal. Both texts reflect a medieval fascination with the devotional body as a zone of closure and opening where transhuman and interspecies associations can be safely explored.
This chapter explores medieval exegetical and affective characterizations of the birthplace of Christ. It focuses in particular on evocations of this birthplace as an exposed, liminal location and argues that the radical exposure endured by Christ at the moment of his birth was crucial to medieval understandings of the significance of the Incarnation. But it also points out that its condition of openness is always in a dialectical relationship with its capacity to enclose and protect.
This chapter makes the case for a literary history that accounts for the multilingual nature of medieval Denmark, giving particular attention to Danish, German, and Latin. It relates such a project to current research interests such as crossing the boundaries of national philologies; demonstrates the need for it by reviewing existing surveys of the period; and outlines some lines of enquiry, including the translation and transmission of texts, that it could pursue.
This essay interprets Dante's "Commedia" as an 'open work' (Eco). It grounds its open-endedness in its representations of interruption: from fictional obstacles in the protagonist's path in the "Inferno" to the narrator's anxiety over unfinishedness in the "Paradiso". Taking its cue from Boccaccio's creative rewriting of Dante's life, the essay resists the pressure of 'total coherence' embedded in (and often projected onto) the "Commedia", in order to reclaim the material vulnerability of the text and of its author.
This chapter considers the role of prolegomena and authorial interventions in constraining and contextualizing orally derived saga narratives in high medieval Iceland. It examines the question of whether prolegomena were intended to be included in oral renditions of the sagas and, if so, in whose 'voice' they were understood to be spoken. The 'openness' of a saga text - the extent of editorial freedom enjoyed by those concerned with extracting it from the oral milieu - has been much discussed; however, less attention has historically been paid to the freedom which the written texts then afforded any would-be reciter for emending or adapting their content when reading them aloud to a live audience. Prolegomena provide our most instructive source of contemporary commentary on how the written sagas should be understood and transmitted, and they therefore represent distinct and important critical texts in their own right, which inform our understanding of how 'open' or 'fixed' medieval Icelanders understood these extant written sagas to be.
This chapter examines the meaning of the term 'aperire' ('to open') in the schools of the twelfth century and within early scholastic thought. It argues for a shift from a traditional understanding of opening as a revelation received from God, towards a more technical definition of opening as applying dialectical logic to a text. The act of opening was employed polemically, both in debates between scholastic masters and to distinguish Christian from Jewish exegetical practices.
From opening books to read them, through the continuous effort at opening one's heart to God, to the eventual disclosure of God's mysteries to human beings, Augustine seems to trace an implicit conceptualization of openness in his "Confessions". The words of Matthew 7. 7–8 underlie Augustine's engagement with openness up to the very last sentence of the book, which ends with a sequence of verbs in the passive voice that culminates with the desired manifestation of the divine. The entire endeavour of opening oneself up undertaken in the "Confessions" aims at this final passive openness, which is (always) yet to come as much as human opera are (always) yet to come to completion.
The essays in this volume seek to understand manifold kinds of medieval openness that become visible when one refrains from modern assumptions, and are also interested in how articulations of openness in the Middle Ages often stand in creative tension with forms of closure and can even be empowered by them. The chapters highlight the complex relationship between author, work, and text, but also explore several, often paradoxical, ways in which medieval culture mobilizes forms, practices, and experiences of openness without having a single abstract concept for it.
Jameson argues that in 'a society bereft of all historicity', 'what used to be the historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past'. The 'postmodern fate' of the historical novel is to be forced to come to terms with 'a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach. Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" (1981) and Patrick Süskind's "Das Parfum. Die Geschichte eines Mörders" (1984) stand out as two hugely successful novels from this period that raise questions about historical representation within the space of the popular. They might therefore be used as test cases for Jameson's concerns. "Midnight's Children" is a sprawling story of Indian and British imperial and post-imperial history across the twentieth century. "Das Parfum" tells the tightly framed tale of a murderous perfumer in eighteenth-century France. Seemingly very different texts, they bear one curious similarity: both feature a protagonist with an unusually sensitive sense of smell.
Siarhei Biareishyk beschäftigt sich mit Spielarten der Kritik an der platonischen Ideenlehre, die er von der epikureischen Tradition über Spinoza bis hin zu Deleuze verfolgt. Diese habe ein Denken von prozessualer und "modaler Ganzheit" ("modal whole") herausgebildet, das gerade auf die Instabilität und die Endlichkeit des Ganzen abhebe. Damit arbeite sie der Vorstellung sowohl einer möglichen Pluralität von Ganzheiten als auch der einer inneren Heterogenität jedes einzelnen Ganzen bis heute überzeugend zu. Im Gegensatz zu einem von vornherein als übersummativ konzipierten Ganzen entfalte diese Tradition Formen des Ganzen, die dynamisch sind und sich prozesshaft konstituieren. Biareishyk versteht das als Chance, Diversität und Disparatheit philosophisch fundieren zu können, ohne die Hoffnung auf Ganzheit(en) preisgeben zu müssen. Lukrez und Spinoza attestiert er auf diese Art und Weise philosophisch wie politisch ein ganz ähnliches Potential wie das, das Latour oder Cuntz in der Leibniz'schen Monadologie sehen.
Die Vorstellung eines relational organisierten Ganzen nimmt Bruno Latour zum Ausgang für eine grundlegende Kritik der modernen Imaginationen des Staates und seiner Grenzen. Diese Imaginationen beruhten auf einer fragwürdigen Konzeption des Ganzen, die fatale Folgen für die Bekämpfung des Klimawandels wie für eine adäquate Einschätzung der Migration zeitige. Es seien althergebrachte, an die Natur und den Organismus angelehnte Vorstellungen von Ganzheit und Teil, die eine Affirmation des sogenannten Staatskörpers oder auch die einer ökonomischen Marktlogik bis heute irrtümlich als unumgänglich erscheinen ließen. Gleichnisse wie das eines die Gliedmaßen ernährenden Bauches aus Shakespeares "Coriolan" oder Mandevilles bekannte "Bienenfabel" suggerierten, dass jedes Gemeinwesen sich von innen aus Teilen zusammensetzen und sich nach außen klar abgrenzen müsse. Tatsächlich aber seien Innen und Außen als fundamental durchlässige Phänomene zu begreifen. Die Idee eines solide gestuften Ganzen müsse ersetzt werden durch die Idee pluraler Ganzheiten, die aus ständig sich überlappenden und immer nur provisorisch verbundenen Elementen bestünden. Latour ist es folglich nicht um eine Diskreditierung, sondern um eine Neukonzeption sowohl des Ganzen als auch der Relationalität zu tun. Das hat massive Konsequenzen für deren Formgebung. Um der Komplexität politischer Strukturen und aktuellen Problemlagen begegnen zu können, müssten Ganzheiten als Netzwerke und nicht mehr als aus Teilen bestehende Körper vorgestellt werden.
In recent years, critics and art historians have pointed to an 'educational turn', a rise in participatory pedagogical art projects and artist-led experimental schools. This essay considers artist-led projects and museum programmes that restage or reenact educational experiments from the past, analysing their limits and possibilities in the study and presentation of modern art history. Much like performance art, pedagogy is ephemeral and contingent, and yet it differs in that it does not establish a fixed spectatorial role. To be understood it must be participated in, for, as Josef Albers described his teaching, 'we are gathering experience'.
Can reenactments be a way to create counter-narratives in and for the museum? Through the analysis of political performance (or what the artist Tania Bruguera calls 'political-timing-specific' artworks), this essay discusses the potential of reenactment as both a practice of materializing memories and narratives of oppression and of rethinking museum policies in terms of preservation and display. Its main argument is that, while the archive can be regarded as a form of materializing the memory of these works, reenactment is more than a way of recovering the past; it is also a device for reconstructing memories of activism and oppression. This essay further suggests that reenactments of political-timing-specific works demand a change in accessioning, conservation, and presentation practices, which might be inclined to erase decentralized art-historical and material narratives.
The reactivation of Rudi Fuchs' 1983 exhibition 'Summer Display' took place in 2009 as part of the collection series, 'Play van Abbe part 1: The Game and the Players', and was entitled 'Repetition: Summer Display 1983'. The reconstruction questioned the codes and systems used within (but also consciously and unconsciously outside) the museum and raised several questions, including: what story did the original composers want to tell, and how can this piece of history be understood today? Is the new presentation a separate exhibition entirely or a copy of the 'original' one? What is then the difference between the idea of copy, repetition, and reenactment? And what is the role of the museum's archive in the process of restaging? What can curatorial institutional archives tell us about the museum itself?
The Neoplastic Room at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź was originally designed in 1948 by the avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński. Destroyed in 1950 and reconstructed in 1960, it became the focal point of the museum, with the 'International Collection of Modern Art' by the a.r. group being exhibited there. At the same time, it became a point of reference for contemporary artists and a strategy for building a permanent collection for the museum, as well as a reflection on how the past can give a vision of the future. This essay focuses on the gesture of 're-curating' the Neoplastic Room in relation to the performative practice of the artists involved (e.g., Daniel Buren, Elżbieta Jabłońska).
To support the practice of preservation and mediation of video works in the LIMA Collection (Amsterdam), the authors explore the possibilities of reinterpretation as a rather common practice in the performing arts. As a choreographer and a dramaturge, they establish a correlation between reinterpretation and dramaturgy - as a way to deal with non-objective or transitory aspects of the works - and describe their method in relation to the video and performance artist Nan Hoover.
UNFOLD : the strategic importance of reinterpretation for media art mediation and conservation
(2022)
UNFOLD: Mediation by Reinterpretation is a research project and interdisciplinary network initiated by LIMA, Platform for Media Art in Amsterdam, that examines reinterpretation as an emerging practice for artistic production, presentation, and preservation of media works. New elements stretch the boundaries of traditional preservation methods and require insights from both the artist and the curator to decide how pieces can be restaged. This essay investigates how to deal with the changes of digital/media artworks over time, and how to preserve and mediate their performative aspects.
Locating authenticity in artworks that are remade (all or in part) or re-performed over time presents a unique challenge for art conservators, whose activities have traditionally been oriented toward caring for the material aspects of art objects. The paper offers a brief overview of perspectives on authenticity and discusses various theoretical models that have been developed to conceptualize how media, installation, and performance artworks are displayed and cared for over time. These include the score/performance model, the concepts of autographicity and allographicity, the concept of iteration, and authenticity as a practice. The author proposes a theoretical model based on the ritual aspects of presenting artworks, arguing that authenticity, repetition, and community participation can be reconciled within a ritual context.
Can reenactment both as reactivation of images and restaging of exhibitions be considered an alternative way of tackling the critical task to re-present art history (i.e., to present it anew) in the here and now, over and over and over again? The gesture of restoring visibility to something no longer present, reactivating or reembodying it as an object/image in and for the present, is here proposed as a (political) act of restitution and historical recontextualization. Examining the boundaries between past and present, original and copy (as well as originality and copyright), repetition and variation, authenticity and auraticity, presence and absence, canon and appropriation, durée and transience, the paper focuses on remediation, reinterpretation, and reconstruction as creative gestures and cultural promises in contemporary art practice, curatorship, and museology.
In the 1990s, the question of the legacy of historical performance was posed with a particular sense of urgency. In the context of most pioneers of the art form having retired from live performance, reenactments not only reproduced past works but positioned artists within the genealogy of performance. The sense of the passage of a generation and the transmission of the memory of past performances were made explicit by Marina Abramović in "The Biography" (1992), a theatre piece in which she stages the very process of accounting for her past, as well as by Takashi Murakami and Oleg Kulik, who emerged on the art scene in the 1990s and mimicked live works from the past.
In this fifteen-minute lecture-performance, Malin Arnell presents her dialogue with the work of French-Italian artist Gina Pane (1939–1990). Oriented around textual and visual traces of Pane and Arnell's historical intra-action, this ongoing dialogue explores performance art documentation and historical narratives. The project interrogates the operations of archives, asking: 'How do queer feminist performance archives make you vulnerable, how do they make you feel, act, react?' 'Whose bodies remain present, and which bodies are lost?' The framework of the work - its repetition with variations and its artistic and queer feminist methodologies - enables an exploration of history, documentation, and bodily epistemology as an attempt to take responsibility for what is not known by doing, through action - through performance.
Kinetic and programmed art has been a trend of contemporary arts that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s. Kinetic artworks often incorporated technology, at that time still immature, and involved the audience in the production of visual, sound, and somatic effects. Gruppo T was the pioneering group at the forefront of this groundbreaking vision of art as reproducible, participatory, and interactive. Through an action research project and the methodological tool of reenactment, a group of researchers, designers, and artists has proposed an alternative way to conserve Gruppo T artworks. The project 'Re-programmed Art: An Open Manifesto' originated from the ephemeral and experimental features, as well as fragility, of the works by Gruppo T - that is, from the difficulties of practice, conservation, technology, and market that have confined them for far too long to the margins of mainstream art history. We conceive reenactment not just a mere restaging but as re-designing, re-thinking, updating, and reprogramming a series of works by Gruppo T.
Theatre, because of its ability to represent through restaging, would seem to be the quintessential platform for reenactment. The "Orestea (una commedia organica?)" by R. Castelluci and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, restaged at the Paris Automne Festival in 2015, twenty years after its 1995 world premiere in Prato, is the starting point for a reflection on the status of restaging in theatre. This case study is the occasion to apply Walter Benjamin's philosophical concept of the 'Jetztzeit' to a theatrical context, and to consider also the 'citational' value of theatrical reenactment. These concepts are useful to study not only the reenactment of theatrical gesture and acting but also to consider the practice of restaging related to the theatrical event conceived in its entirety.
This article investigates and proposes the concept of speculative writing, which is a disruptive sort of dramaturgy mediated by artificial intelligence. What are the kinds of events created by speculative writing? What might its history and genealogy be? What might the duration of an alphanumeric reenactment be? Guided by these questions, the article details its search for speculative writing in unfilmed script history as well as in premediation events. According to these concepts, this essay concludes that speculative writing will enact potential, abstract, and premediated events, which have never become material media.
Throughout his career, Stanley Cavell's subject has been the ordinary: what Ralph Waldo Emerson would call 'the near, the low, the common'. Cavell provides compelling insights into Emerson's efforts to locate philosophy within the flow of everyday life. He examines how Emerson renews common thinking, citations, and fragments from the works of others by means of his 'aversive thinking': his technique of turning writing back upon itself. While taking Cavell's Emerson readings as its point of departure, this essay switches Cavell's philosophical angle for a philological one. I suggest that Emerson's engagement with contemporary debates concerning the historical reading of sacred and secular literature (the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare) formed his own practice of reworking literatures of various origins and recasting aesthetics in major ways.
What is the relationship between reenactment and repetition compulsion? By shedding light upon the different levels of reenactment at stake in "Yella" by Christian Petzold, I analyse the 'transitional spaces' where the German filmmaker places his wandering characters who have 'slipped out of history'. In "Yella" Petzold mixes up past, present, future, and oneiric re-elaboration to question the memory of the past of GDR, which in his view has never really been constituted as history. The characters that populate this movie move in a setting constructed at the crossroad between a protected environment where the reenacted events are sheltered by the time and the space of the plot and a place weathered by the unpredictable atmospheric agents of the present. How and to which extent can the clash between different temporalities produce a minimal variation?
The Atlas Group created a digital mixed-media archive of contemporary Lebanese history, made up of produced and found documents. These archives look immediately ambiguous: they don't collect historical documents; they actually contain visual artefacts created by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad. These digital mixed-media archives - partly accessible on the web but also physically exhibited and performed - are not intended to preserve the memory of the past, but they become indeed useful to actualize history by giving it back in the form of a historical fiction. What if archives should not deal with memory, but with amnesia? And what kind of historical temporality do they re-activate?
In the reactivation of the feminist collective of artists Le Nemesiache, this paper looks at the tension between rhetoric and translation in relation to the dislocation of archival materials from their situatedness in place (Naples) and time (1970 to the present). Translation emerges as the conveyor of the conditions from which the addresser started, as well as the ones of the addressees, as a potential that takes place in the moment of enunciation through a plurality of subjects. Considering the epistemological tension between history and fiction, as well as the mediation that happens through the body and the different subjectivities triggered by intra-action, this essay will engage with the following question: if the archive is the memory, can dramaturgy and reenactment from the archive become the message of a prophecy?
"Prompt, Immediate, Now / Very Restrained and Cautious" (2013), "Defending Territory in a Networked World" (2013) and "Afgang 04.00" (2017) are three sound pieces that lean on events of historical proportions. They involve addressing the artistic challenge of letting difficult historical narratives resonate in the present. The artistic process for all three works involved finding fitting modes of reenactment and providing a present-day position on why and how these materials may be incorporated in artworks today, as well as contributing to historical revision and political resistance.
A sense of repetition pervades contemporary South African political and cultural debate. Several recent studies have drawn attention to the fact that the renewed student protests since March 2015 parallel several features of the resistance and liberation movements of the 1970s and 1980s. At a pivotal position between the two moments of political struggle stands the 'miracle' of the peaceful transition in 1994. Within this set of circumstances a group of curators, artists, and writers, Gabi Ngcobo and Kemang Wa Lehulere, amongst others, formed a collective under the name CHR (Center for Historical Reenactments) in Johannesburg in 2010. The CHR has pursued several questions that interrogate the complexity of a shared memory bridging segregated Apartheid legacy: how do readings of the past inform contemporary urgencies, and what are the political potentials of artistic interpretations of histories? How do they participate in the formation of new subjectivities?
Gilles Deleuze, borrowing from Maurice Blanchot's distinctive vocabulary in "The Space of Literature", offers death as the ultimate example of the event. In this paper, I propose reversing the current of concept-metaphor against a certain performance theory of sovereignty and ask, not what the concept-metaphor death does for the thought of the event, but what the concept-metaphor event does for the thought of death on the hunger strike in order to explore the divide between the space of dying and the space of politics, which are incompatibly distinct and yet inextricably linked. Revealing an irreducible anachrony between two deaths - the passage of time that separates dying as pure potentiality from death as a radically contingent event that comes either too early or too late - I argue that the political efficacy of hunger striking depends less on the consummation of death in the immediacy of an ecstatic moment than on the prolongation of this interval of time by potentially endless repetitive enactments, which imply both finality and incompletion.
This paper focuses on an ongoing project that began in 2012, entitled "The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders". This project is an attempt to reconstitute the Marcos Collection. Sourced from auction catalogues, museum archives, and scant government records, their lavish inventory of commissioned portraits, jewellery, Regency silverware, and old master paintings is reproduced as photographic installations, postcards, and three-dimensional prints. Reconstruction, in this instance, becomes a sustained democratic gesture, allowing an increasingly forgetful public to access a collection that has remained unavailable through a systemic failure by successive post-dictatorial governments to institutionalize collective acts of remembering.
State security archives in Eastern Europe are shedding new light on the operative practices of the secret services and their interaction with performance art. Surveillance, tracking, undermining, disruption, writing of reports, and measure plans were different operative methods to be carried out in continuous repetitive processes. This paper argues that, through these repetitive working processes, state security agencies were permanently engaged in different forms of reenactments: of orders, legends, report writing, and inventing measure plans. With this operative reenactment, state security agencies not only tried to track down facts but also created 'fake facts' serving their agenda. These 'fake-facts' were then again repeated and reenacted by informants endlessly to be 'effective' in the surveillance and elimination of performance art.
The essay engages with a screenplay by Michel Foucault, written in 1970 for a film, not realized during Foucault's lifetime, about Pablo Picasso's "Las Meninas", a series of 58 paintings that the artist made in 1957, taking up, updating, reinterpreting the famous painting with the same title by Diego Velázquez (1656). This screenplay is at the same time an example of critical reflection on reenactment in art history and itself a reenactment practice of sorts: the filmic repetition of an artistic repetition. It invites a reflection on the role of repetition as a critical operation: how doubles, reenacted images, and 'countermimesis' can become creative gestures and opening movements of transformation through plays of refraction, duplication, and multiplication of the realities and subjectivities at stake in them.
Tracing the complex history of the term 'reenactment', back to R.G. Collingwood's philosophy of history, on the one hand, and popular practices of war reenactments and living history museums, on the other, a survey of its current contribution in art and museum practices highlights the importance of historicity - a category the postmodern was supposed to have vacated - in a wide range of examples, from Rod Dickinson and Jeremey Deller to Alexandra Pirici, Manuel Pelmuş, and Milo Rau. Performance reenactments, in particular, are premised on performance art having become historical, but also threaten to digest history in favour of a mere productivist mobilization for the needs of current attention economies. An alternative could be the attempt to counter historical with dramatic time in order to unlock unrealized possibilities and futures, as the term preenactment promises.
The reactivation of time
(2022)
Reappropriating, restaging, revisioning, remediating: at the crossroad of the new millennium, reenactment has undoubtedly emerged as a key issue in the field of artistic production, in theoretical discourse, and in the socio-political sphere. Taking an ever larger distance from notions of historical revival and 'Living History', current reenactments call into question whether the present can unpack, embody, or disentangle the past. Accordingly, to reenact is to experience the past by reactivating either a particular cultural heritage or unexplored utopias. If to reenact means not to restore but to challenge the past, history is thus turned into a possible and perpetual becoming, a site for invention and renewal.
First as a student of comparative literature with a focus on German and then as a professor of German Studies, I’ve been traveling back and forth to Germany for three decades, almost exactly the age of the reunified German state. I have stayed for weeks, for months, or for more than a year at a time. I have lived in Leipzig, in Cologne, and in Munich, but I have spent by far the most time in Berlin, a place that I have come to consider a second home. Throughout that time, Germany has changed enormously, both demographically and attitudinally. In relation to diversity in general and in its relationship to Jews.
Rezension zu Peter Salmon, "An Event, Perhaps. A Biography of Jacques Derrida", London / New York: Verso, 2020.
In the age of mechanical reproducibility, the 'aura' surrounding works of art undergoes a crisis. The contemporary relevance of Walter Benjamin's thesis - in its societal, aesthetic, and media-theoretical significance - is illustrated by former U.S. president Donald Trump's purported ownership of "Les deux soeurs" ("Two Sisters"), also known as "Sur la terrasse" ("On the Terrace"), by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Journalist Mark Bowden, who caught a glimpse of the painting when he was invited to Trump's jet in 1997, describes the event in an article for Vanity Fair: "He showed off the gilded interior of his plane - calling me over to inspect a Renoir on its walls, beckoning me to lean in closely to see … what? The luminosity of the brush strokes? The masterly use of color? No. The signature. 'Worth $10 million,' he told me." Of course, this is the attitude that one might expect from a real-estate mogul turned art collector (although not from a future president). In ignorance of both form and content - to say nothing of their unity - the painting is reduced to its sheer exchange value, concentrated in the signature guaranteeing its authenticity.
In a time when 'internationalization' and 'diversity' have become key areas universities are expected to excel in, it may seem an almost self-evident endeavor to install a memorial for a figure as influential and internationalist as Du Bois, whose connection to the Humboldt University outlasted two ideologically very different political systems. Planned to be positioned in the ground floor of the main building, the memorial, which will start production as soon as the last funding has been secured, reveals an image right at its center that "exist[s] in virtually every student's life and family album, and commonly serve[s] as vehicle[s] of recognition, remembrance and commemoration": the class photograph. What are the main considerations underlying the W. E. B. Du Bois Memorial's concept and design? How has it evolved so far? And what can such a memorial realistically achieve?
The resistance of aesthetics consists in the mode of experience that art affords, which promotes individual consciousness and political awareness by exploding the dualisms with which we tend to simplify things: centralization and decentralization, totality and fragmentation, communism and neoliberal capitalism, dictatorship and democracy. Although the formal complexity and ambiguous compositions met in works by the likes of Picasso, Woolf, and Schönberg most obviously support this sort of experience, it can be drawn out of all art to various degrees. Indeed, what distinguishes these modernists from the artists who came before and after them is how they set aesthetic experience as the aim of artistic production. But no work of art can be reduced either to the whole or to the sum of its parts; either to systematicity or to formlessness. Strictly speaking, the opposing ideals of classical and critical aesthetics are not two distinct aesthetic positions, but the theoretical limits between which art unfolds. By analogy, totalitarian governance and social atomism are not oppositional political materializations, but the two extremes at which politics ends.