New Ghost Stories - Research Into an "Exhibition In the Time of Its Technical Reproducibility" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ghost Photography, published in 'Image of an Exhibition', ed Nicholas Smith, Relief Press 2016
Discussing the relationship that photography has to the dead is a well trodden path. We have all encountered the image of a person long since dead through their photographs. No doubt for most people today the vast majority of photographic images we have encountered are digital rather than physical. How does the shift from analogue towards digital photography alter or accentuate the ghostly qualities of the photographic image? We have all, almost certainly, also seen many more photographs of artworks than we will ever hope to encounter 'in the flesh'. How does this change the encounter? Philomene Pirecki is an artist whose work can be sited at the point where these questions intersect. I want to introduce three starting points which should provide us with some groundwork for examining these questions, and make for an interesting reading of Pirecki's Reflecting 1 (2008) and Image Persistence series (2013-ongoing). Anselm Franke's Animism is a project that spans across four iterations of an exhibition that took place around Europe (at Mukha and Extra City, Antwerp, Kunsthalle Bern, Generali Foundation, Vienna and Haus der Kultern de Welt, Berlin) and then in New York between 2010 and 2012, the book; Animism Vol 1, and a guest-edited edition of the e-flux online journal. The book gathers together a collection of essays that approach the subject of animism from a wide range of angles and approaches, taking in critical theory, anthropology, music, the occult and art-writing. It opens with 'Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls or: The Sudden Disorganization of Boundaries' – a text by Franke himself, laying out the rationale of his project. In the essay he charts the history of 'animism' as an anthropological term attributed to people who apparently granted agency and lifelike subjective qualities to objects. Franke draws heavily on Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern (1991). In that book Latour characterises modernity as a practice of boundary-making, proceeding by setting up binaries and oppositions such as subject and object, life and non-life, and most importantly, nature and culture. Through distinguishing what occurs naturally and that can be objectively studied from what is subjective and determined by culture, scientific knowledge can be set on a solid footing, and through this a colonial project that enables civilised rational Europeans to go out into the world and study the uncivilised primitives of other lands is established. Latour shows how these apparently well-defined
Ghost Stories for Grown-Ups: Pictorial Matters in Times of War and Conflict
Humanities journal, 2020
Through the concept of a visual apparatus, the attempt is to shed new light and thinking on pictures as material objects; how they act and feed into our subjectivities, experiences and realities and to account for their currency, duration, affectivity and authority beyond transparent representation or symbolic meaning. In order to achieve this, Barad's agential realism is inflected by insights from Malafouris's (2013) material engagement theory; W.J.T. Mitchell's (2005) image theory; Jens Eder and Charlotte Klonk's (2017) image operations; Mondzian's (2005) understanding of the economy of the image, as well as the ontological concerns of new German art history and image science exemplified in the work of Hans Belting (1996, 2011) and Horst Bredekamp (2017), for example. In this framework, the worlds pictures create, and the subjectivities they produce, are not understood to precede the phenomena they depict. The picture, as the outcome of the apparatus which produces it, makes an 'observational cut' that simultaneously excludes and includes certain elements from its frame. As such, it has to be comprehended as party to processes which are both ethical and political. A fact which is particularly important during times of conflict and war.
Chapter 5 | Spectres of Modernism: Multiple mediums and works depicting ghosts
History has Tongues: re-evaluating historiography of the moving image through analysis of the voice and critical writing in British artists' film and video of the 1980s, 2015
Chapter 5 explores the themes of ghosts, memory and hauntology, considering inclinations that are connected to the losses and closures of the support systems surrounding ‘independent’ film and video production in the UK in the 1960s/70s, and a wider fear of forgetting, evident in histories of artists' moving image published during the 1990s. As Andreas Huyssen observed in the early 2000s, the cultural ‘privileging of trauma formed a thick discursive network with those other master-signifiers of the 1990s, the abject and the uncanny, all of which have to do with repression, specters, and a present repetitively haunted by the past’ (2003: 8). The works explored in Chapter 5 include Sarah Pucill, Ken McMullen, and Nicky Hamlyn, foregrounding how voices are carried by and contained within ‘mediums’. Discussion explores the ways in which mediums of many different kinds are connected to on-going conversations through and about the past and moving image historiography more broadly.
RCL — Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens / Journal of Communication and Languages, 2020
NEW DEADLINE - 31st MAY 2020 ------------------------------------------------------- RCL — Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens / Journal of Communication and Languages CALL FOR PAPERS Photography, Cinema, and the Ghostly – RCL n. 53 (Autumn/Winter) Editors: José Bértolo (CEC, U. Lisbon) Margarida Medeiros (ICNOVA — NOVA U. Lisbon) Throughout the nineteenth century, the camera was believed to be a diabolical machine that could steal human souls. In one of the most notorious texts included in When I Was a Photographer (1899), Félix Nadar famously described how Honoré de Balzac thought that “each body in nature is composed of a series of specters”, and that each “Daguerreian operation” would retain one of these spectral layers until the human body of the photographed person amounted to nothing. If on the one hand there was this general idea that photography was a “killing instrument”, on the other hand it was clear from the beginning that photographs also granted new lives to human beings, animals, objects, etc. Being the “perfect” double of what was once seen in the visible world, the photograph becomes the space where that which is no longer alive can continue to exist. With this in mind, Roland Barthes wrote on his Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980) that this relatively new and mostly mechanical art form is responsible for the “return of the Dead”. Likewise, Susan Sontag (1977) also posited that “all photographs are memento mori”. The correlation between photography and death is particularly striking in the last decades of the nineteenth century with the emergence of spirit photography. Through the extensive use of double exposures, William Mumler, William Hope, and others, demonstrated that photography not only dealt with physical reality, but could also place itself within the realms of imagination, magic and illusion. Like photography, cinema has since its beginnings been associated with spectrality. As early as 1896, Georges Méliès was already directing films such as Le manoir du diable, where editing tricks were used in order to create a supernatural world inhabited by fantastic creatures. At the same time, the supposedly realistic films of brothers Lumière were also being perceived by some spectators as much more than direct and lifelike representations of the world. After watching a Lumière program in 1896, Maxim Gorky famously wrote: “Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows […] It is not life but its shadow, not motion but its soundless spectre”. In the following decades, film critics, film theorists and philosophers as different as Ricciotto Canudo, Jean Epstein, Gilles Deleuze or Jean-Louis Leutrat explored ghostly metaphors in their inquiries on the nature of film. The prime example of this critical tendency occurs in an interview published in the Cahiers du Cinéma (2001), in which Jacques Derrida, almost a decade past the publication of Specters of Marx, characterized cinema as a “spectral technique of apparitions”. In addition, scriptwriters and directors pertaining to different historical and cultural contexts are evidently interested in stories in which the ghostly, the oneiric and the immaterial play a special part. The exploration of such elements is not limited to German Expressionism, the American Gothic (Film) tradition of the 1940s, or the Italian Giallo, also playing an important role in the works of filmmakers as distinct and unique as Yevgeni Bauer, Luis Buñuel, Jacques Tourneur, Kaneto Shindo, Alain Resnais, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, or Pedro Costa. Borrowing from several important studies on the ghostly published in the wake of the “spectral turn” popularized by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock in Spectral America (2004), this thematic issue aims to depart from and contribute to an ongoing debate which shows that many areas of spectrality in art are yet to explore. This special issue aims to reconsider the close link between photography, cinema and the ghostly, bringing together traditional and new historical, theoretical and philosophical approaches. Papers can address, but are not limited to, the following topics: • The nineteenth century, the emergence of new media, and the ghostly imagination • Photography, memory, and death • Spirit photography • The ghostly in modern and contemporary photography • Key issues related to the ontology of the photographic image: (un)reality, (im)materiality, (in)visibilitiy and the (un)seen • Ghostly metaphors in film writing (criticism, theory, philosophy) • The spectres of digital media and/or film (in photography and/or cinema) • Experience, perception, subjective images and imagination • The representation of dreams and hallucinations • Special effects aiming to enhance the spectral dimension of photography and/or film (e.g. double exposure, superimposition, stop trick, rear projection, acousmatic sound) • Ghostly or haunted media in fiction film (photography, radio, the Internet) • Ghosts across different genres (e.g., horror, melodrama, comedy, war film) • Critical and contemporary approaches to the concept of spectrality The articles can be written in English, French, or Portuguese, and will be subject to a double-blind peer review. They must comply with the journal’s submission guidelines and be sent through the OJS platform until May 10th, 2020. For queries, contact the editors José Bértolo (jlbertolo@gmail.com) and/or Margarida Medeiros (medeiros.margarida@gmail.com). Guidelines for submission and Instructions for authors: http://www.fcsh.unl.pt/rcl/index.php/rcl/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions Website: https://www.fcsh.unl.pt/rcl/index.php/rcl/announcement/view/15