Martin Lucas | Hunter College (original) (raw)
Papers by Martin Lucas
World Records Journal, 2020
This article examines the work of two social practice artists, Jeanne van Heeswijk, and Tania Bru... more This article examines the work of two social practice artists, Jeanne van Heeswijk, and Tania Bruguera who in different ways work with Hannah Arendt's evocation of democratic action in a "space of appearances" as the fulfillment of human potential. The article looks at how these artists use different approaches to offer the moment of of personal engagement by both artist and co-participants in an artistic project as a potential route to rebuilding the relationship between constituent power and a state power delegitimized by the shrinking of the public sphere, opening up space for possible futures.
Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, 2019
This paper looks at new articulations of the subject found in documentary films about the Indigna... more This paper looks at new articulations of the subject found in documentary films about the Indignado or 15-M (15 May) movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. These movements rejected representation in favor of a call for direct democracy on a political level. The paper suggests that their rejection had significant implications for documentary film, forcing makers to embrace new routes to portraying thought and action in a collective context.
The paper uses the work of theorists of affect including Franco Berardi and Brian Massumi, as well as of political theorists and social scientists including Jodi Dean and Zeynap Tufekci to suggest that the groups that rose up in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008 were reacting specifically to a rise of an attention economy, an economic system that depends on the exploitation of the “immaterial labor” of human affect and attention to extract profit.
The paper shows how the film Tres Instantes, Un Grito (Three Moments, One Cry, 2013) by Chilean-Spanish filmmaker Cecilia Barriga uses various strategies to avoid typical narrative approaches to character identification and development, and focuses instead on the shared space of discussion where a collective understanding is produced, and demonstrates how this strategy is appropriate for the depiction of a self-organizing movement. Other films emerging from the Occupy Wall Street and 15-M movements are analyzed to show how approaches using filmic rhythm and bodily entrainment give a sense of how these movements create new affective protocols for shared political action.
I suggest finally that affective logics deployed in these films offer a way of understanding how films, specifically political documentaries, function beyond representation per se to help open a new kind of shared political space.
Abstract This essay re-evaluates the ethics of subject relations in documentary film in the conte... more Abstract This essay re-evaluates the ethics of subject relations in documentary film in the context of films dealing with traumatic memory and disaster. Using a mix of personal insights developed in the context of making a film about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and an examination of notions of representation in the literature of documentary film studies, trauma studies and social science, the essay suggests that the case of disaster testimony and its witnesses, the keystone location of the witness to the disaster in the story arc is a position that needs to be reexamined. From a narrative angle, the disaster story is a representational limit situation, where meaning and language break down. From a social point of view the notion of the " use " of testimony as part of a narrative raises complex ethical questions as witnesses are deployed in film and literature. Looking at recent work in anthropology and trauma studies, I document how survivors of traumatic situations have tried to acquire agency in relation to their own stories and their use. The paper notes that such stories are now part of a growing set of discourses in juridical contexts (reparations) and political ones (truth and reconciliation commissions) and looks at how problems of social and personal trauma elide in the construction of larger narratives. It suggests that the urgencies of such contexts are themselves implicated in a traumatized
World Records Journal, 2020
This article examines the work of two social practice artists, Jeanne van Heeswijk, and Tania Bru... more This article examines the work of two social practice artists, Jeanne van Heeswijk, and Tania Bruguera who in different ways work with Hannah Arendt's evocation of democratic action in a "space of appearances" as the fulfillment of human potential. The article looks at how these artists use different approaches to offer the moment of of personal engagement by both artist and co-participants in an artistic project as a potential route to rebuilding the relationship between constituent power and a state power delegitimized by the shrinking of the public sphere, opening up space for possible futures.
Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, 2019
This paper looks at new articulations of the subject found in documentary films about the Indigna... more This paper looks at new articulations of the subject found in documentary films about the Indignado or 15-M (15 May) movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. These movements rejected representation in favor of a call for direct democracy on a political level. The paper suggests that their rejection had significant implications for documentary film, forcing makers to embrace new routes to portraying thought and action in a collective context.
The paper uses the work of theorists of affect including Franco Berardi and Brian Massumi, as well as of political theorists and social scientists including Jodi Dean and Zeynap Tufekci to suggest that the groups that rose up in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008 were reacting specifically to a rise of an attention economy, an economic system that depends on the exploitation of the “immaterial labor” of human affect and attention to extract profit.
The paper shows how the film Tres Instantes, Un Grito (Three Moments, One Cry, 2013) by Chilean-Spanish filmmaker Cecilia Barriga uses various strategies to avoid typical narrative approaches to character identification and development, and focuses instead on the shared space of discussion where a collective understanding is produced, and demonstrates how this strategy is appropriate for the depiction of a self-organizing movement. Other films emerging from the Occupy Wall Street and 15-M movements are analyzed to show how approaches using filmic rhythm and bodily entrainment give a sense of how these movements create new affective protocols for shared political action.
I suggest finally that affective logics deployed in these films offer a way of understanding how films, specifically political documentaries, function beyond representation per se to help open a new kind of shared political space.
Abstract This essay re-evaluates the ethics of subject relations in documentary film in the conte... more Abstract This essay re-evaluates the ethics of subject relations in documentary film in the context of films dealing with traumatic memory and disaster. Using a mix of personal insights developed in the context of making a film about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and an examination of notions of representation in the literature of documentary film studies, trauma studies and social science, the essay suggests that the case of disaster testimony and its witnesses, the keystone location of the witness to the disaster in the story arc is a position that needs to be reexamined. From a narrative angle, the disaster story is a representational limit situation, where meaning and language break down. From a social point of view the notion of the " use " of testimony as part of a narrative raises complex ethical questions as witnesses are deployed in film and literature. Looking at recent work in anthropology and trauma studies, I document how survivors of traumatic situations have tried to acquire agency in relation to their own stories and their use. The paper notes that such stories are now part of a growing set of discourses in juridical contexts (reparations) and political ones (truth and reconciliation commissions) and looks at how problems of social and personal trauma elide in the construction of larger narratives. It suggests that the urgencies of such contexts are themselves implicated in a traumatized