DOCSLIB.ORG

A Taste for the Transgressive.Pdf

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
A Taste for the Transgressive.Pdf Transgression used to be an artistic tactic. Now it belongs to the far right By Fintan O’Toole: Have shock tactics had their day? THE IRISH TIMES: Sat, Jun 17, 2017 https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/transgression-used-to-be-an-artistic-tactic-now-it-belongs-to-the- far-right-1.3115697 For a long time the hippest word in art criticism was “transgressive”. One of the things that defined a work as modern was the breaking of taboos. And there were so many taboos to break: depictions of sex, obscene language, descriptions of bodily functions, blasphemy. Modernity in art was intertwined with a sense of liberation: the artist was the one who dared to say the unsayable, to reveal what was hidden, to make normal what had been shamefully secret. But here’s the problem: in western culture transgression doesn’t feel liberating any more. Its energy has passed to the far right, and in this transition we have a paradox: transgression is being allied to repression. Modern art defined itself in opposition to mass culture, but also in opposition to the limits imposed by church and state. It represented not just “the shock of the new” but, more obviously, the shock of the shocking. It is impossible for us to appreciate how vile something like Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts, which turns on hereditary syphilis, seemed to quite intelligent and cultured critics. Ibsen’s translator William Archer compiled a lexicon of terms used to describe it in the mainstream English press, among them “abominable, disgusting, bestial, fetid, loathsome, putrid, crapulous, offensive, scandalous, repulsive, revolting, blasphemous, abhorrent, degrading, unwholesome, sordid, foul, filthy, malodorous, noisome.” Virginia Woolf couldn’t bring herself to finish Ulysses, so we don’t know how she would have coped when it gets really filthy, with Molly Bloom’s soliloquy It’s easy, in retrospect, to laugh at these reactions and to write them off as mere reactionary idiocy. But even people who were themselves at the cutting edge of new artistic forms could feel almost physically sick in the presence of work that described the ordinary realities of the human body. Virginia Woolf found Ulysses to be the work of “a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples” and “ultimately nauseating”. She couldn’t bring herself to finish it, so we don’t know how she would have coped when it gets really filthy, with Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. Language itself was a field of transgression. Well into the 1960s the official stage censor in England, the office of the lord chamberlain, demanded the removal of words we would now consider pretty mild. Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mister Sloane, for example, lost “prat”, “fart”, “shit” and “arse”. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was shorn of “arses”, “balls” and “I’d like to pee.” It’s easy, too, to forget that western public discourse placed severe limits not just around sex and the body but also around God. Beckett had a terrible time with, as he called him, the lord chamberpot over the very funny prayer sequence in Endgame, which concludes with Hamm’s declaration: “The bastard! He doesn’t exist.” (As Beckett rather reasonably pointed out, this is hardly less offensive to the deity than Jesus’s cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) The controversy around Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, a 1987 photograph of a plastic statue of Jesus immersed in the artist’s urine, rumbled on for decades in the United States. Censorship is no fun, but the transgression of these boundaries gave the avant-garde much of its energy, from Dada to punk, from surrealism to the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe or Tracey Emin’s installation of her unmade bed and stained sheets. Transgression raised the stakes. It gave an edge of danger and courage even to work that was otherwise mediocre. It made audiences and readers feel that they were involved with the artists in an act of rebellion against bourgeois piety and institutional repression. But this energy declined as the boundaries widened. Capitalist culture turned out to be very good at absorbing the transgressive. The Rolling Stones logo of a tongue sticking out is just another corporate emblem. Sex scenes that would have been scarcely possible in the most outre cinema are standard fare in TV blockbusters like Game of Thrones. The first lesbian kiss in a British television soap opera was in 1994. God (or at least the Christian God) is mocked – regularly. In Fr Jack’s ejaculations, “Feck! Arse!” is no more shocking than “Drink! Girls!” These days transgression doesn’t belong to the progressive avant-garde. It belongs to the neofascists. The self- styled alt-right is fuelled by the thrill of transgression. In the guise of a war on political correctness it revels in insult, abuse, shock tactics and the outrageous. It gets its thrills by breaching the taboos erected by progressive culture against homophobia, racism, misogyny and xenophobia. What Seán O’Casey called “throwing stones at stained-glass windows” now appeals mostly to the frat-boy fascists of the internet. But they are no longer marginal: Donald Trump is a walking (or more likely golf-carting) embodiment of transgression. The provocative assault on accepted norms of decency is itself the new normal. This new form of cultural provocation is not the same as what we must now call the old artistic one. The modernist strategy of transgression was aimed mostly at liberating people from shame about their bodies and their thoughts. It was about expanding the space for human freedom and legitimising groups – homosexual people, for example – who had been placed beyond the pale. The postmodernist alt-right culture of provocation has precisely opposite aims: it uses shame and threat to close down the space for expression and to exclude whole groups from it by delegitimising them. But it poses a very difficult question for contemporary art: in the age of repressive transgression have shock tactics had their day? A Taste for the Transgressive: Pushing Body Limits in Contemporary Performance Art Tracy Fahey- Media Culture Journal. Vol 17, No 1 (2014) http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/781 Years have come and gone and Bob is still around He’s tied up by his ankles and he’s hanging upside down A lifetime of infection and his lungs all filled with phlegm The CF would’ve killed him if it weren’t for S&M Supermasochistic BoB has Cystic FiBrosis by Bob Flanagan. Soundtrack from 1997 documentary, Sick: The Life & Death of BoB Flanagan In the 1997 film, Sick: The Life & Death of BoB Flanagan, Supermasochist, artist Bob Flanagan quite literally lays himself bare to the viewer. This is a wrenching documentary which charts the dying Flanagan’s battles with cystic fibrosis (CF), and also explores the impact of this on his art and life. Sick also explores to an explicit degree the sadomasochist practices that permeated Flanagan’s private life and performance art practice, and which he used as a means of asserting control of the chronic pain and infirmity of his medical condition. Sick is not an easy watch. The film evokes feelings of fear, empathy, and horror. It challenges notions of taste and bad taste. It subjects the viewer to witness the vulnerability of the repeatedly tortured and invaded body of the artist, and of his eventual confrontation with death. As performance pieces go, this is an extreme example of body-based art. Where does this extraordinary piece stem from? From which traditions in art does it draw? To answer these questions, it is necessary to examine the framework of disability art, transgressive art, and also the tradition of medical Gothic, or the history of the Gothic body as a site of art—art that involves reading the body as carnivalesque, as degenerate, as ab-human, as abject entity. The Gothic Body as Site of Art The body has long been a site of exploration in medical practice and in artistic practice. The body has been displayed and examined in various forms, as subject, object, or abject entity through ossories, medical collections, museums of pathology, and freak shows. Paintings of crucifixions and martyrdoms, and practices of flagellation have glorified the tortured body of Christians as physical reminders of extreme piety. The abnormal or monstrous body has been a trope in art since the medieval period, often identified with ideas of evil or sin. Anatomical bodies have been referenced and explored by artists since the Renaissance. With the popular explosion of performance art in the 1960’s, bodily practices have been incorporated into site specific art. Artists’ bodies are offered for our gaze, and sometimes for interaction with, all within the context of performance. Although performance art originates in the early 20th century, it was exponents of the 1960’s that firmly aligned this practice with the site of the artist’s body. At this time, the body became a new focus of culture, with the rise in sexual freedom and the accepted use of nudity in performances and happenings. This resulted in the performance of body-based pieces such as Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964) and Interior Scroll (1975), Hermann Nitsch and the Viennese Actionists and their Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries (1962), and Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1971). This legacy of sexual, violent, or abject performances results in the creation of provocative and disturbing contemporary pieces such as Sick that confront the spectator with the vulnerabilities and limits of the living body. Today, contemporary culture is suffused with images of the body, both the idealised bodies of advertising and music videos, and the grotesque and transfigured bodies of contemporary art.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Extreme Art Film: Text, Paratext and DVD Culture Simon Hobbs
    Extreme Art Film: Text, Paratext and DVD Culture Simon Hobbs The thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Portsmouth. September 2014 Declaration Whilst registered as a candidate for the above degree, I have not been registered for any other research award. The results and conclusions embodied in this thesis are the work of the named candidate and have not been submitted for any other academic award. Word count: 85,810 Abstract Extreme art cinema, has, in recent film scholarship, become an important area of study. Many of the existing practices are motivated by a Franco-centric lens, which ultimately defines transgressive art cinema as a new phenomenon. The thesis argues that a study of extreme art cinema needs to consider filmic production both within and beyond France. It also argues that it requires an historical analysis, and I contest the notion that extreme art cinema is a recent mode of Film production. The study considers extreme art cinema as inhabiting a space between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms, noting the slippage between the two often polarised industries. The study has a focus on the paratext, with an analysis of DVD extras including ‘making ofs’ and documentary featurettes, interviews with directors, and cover sleeves. This will be used to examine audience engagement with the artefacts, and the films’ position within the film market. Through a detailed assessment of the visual symbols used throughout the films’ narrative images, the thesis observes the manner in which they engage with the taste structures and pictorial templates of art and exploitation cinema.
    [Show full text]
  • 37Th Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium University of Pennsylvania and Villanova University 27-29 October 2011, Philadelphia, PA
    Law & Order / La loi & l’ordre: 37th Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium University of Pennsylvania and Villanova University 27-29 October 2011, Philadelphia, PA ABSTRACTS Helen Abbott, Bangor University Bending the laws of poetry in Baudelaire, Banville and Mallarmé This paper sets out to analyse how poets in the mid-to-late nineteenth century in France distort, manipulate or completely abolish accepted rules of poetry. It will focus on contemporary poetic treatises in conjunction with what poets say about their poetry. Banville’s own treatise will form a pivotal text in my analysis, but I will start with a close-reading of Baudelaire’s octosyllabic sonnet, ‘Épigraphe pour un Livre condamné’, published in 1861, in the wake of his 1857 trial for Les Fleurs du Mal. As a text which signals how Baudelaire bends the laws of poetry, he also outlines how he expects his readers to be capable of grasping the clever subtlety that his manipulations entail. What critical and poetic texts of this era reveal, then, is that prescriptive legislation surrounding poetic endeavours is not done away with altogether, but the emphasis shifts so that a new aesthetic criteria, the art of listening to poetry, takes centre stage in the debate over poetic validity and status. Like Baudelaire, Mallarmé is uneasy about explaining poetic techniques to the public, but when he does so, he uses legislative vocabulary, as his pivotal ‘Crise de vers’ text demonstrates. The influence of Banville’s prosodic theories on Mallarmé is made clear by his recognition that Banville provides an ideal example of how the alexandrine line can open itself up to greater flexibility, whilst not yet requiring a total dissolution of prosodic rules.
    [Show full text]
  • VIPAW Wall Texts
    3rd Venice International Performance Art Week, 2016 Ouch – Pain and Performance A screening programme curated by Live Art Development Agency, London “I see pain as an inevitable byproduct of interesting performance.” Dominic Johnson According to Wikipedia ‘pain’ is an “unpleasant feeling often caused by intense or damaging stimuli…(it) motivates the individual to withdraw from damaging situations and to avoid similar experiences in the future.” But for many artists and audiences the opposite is just as true, and pain within the context of performance is a challenging, exhilarating and profound experience. Ouch is a collection of documentation and artists’ films looking at pain and performance. The works are not necessarily performances about pain, but in some way involve or invoke pain in their making or reading or experience - both the pain artists cause themselves within the course of their work, whether intentional or not, and the experiences of audiences as they are invited to inflict pain on artists or are subjected to pain and discomfort themselves. The selected works feature eminent and ground breaking artists from around the world whose practices address provocative issues including the lived experiences of illness, the aging female body, cosmetic surgery, addiction, embodied public protest, animalistic impulses, blood letting, staged fights, acts of self harm and flagellation, and what can happen when you invite audiences to be complicit in performance actions. Ouch featured artists: Marina Abramovic, Ron Athey, Marcel.Li Antunez Roca, Franko B, Wafaa Bilal, Rocio Boliver, Cassils, Bob Flanagan, Regina Jose Galindo, jamie lewis hadley, Nicola Hunter & Ernst Fischer, Oleg Kulik, Martin O’Brien, Kira O’Reilly, ORLAN, Petr Pavlensky.
    [Show full text]
  • FAÇADE: ZONE A: Religion/Family
    CHECKLIST for Participant Inc. February 14-April 4, 2021 Curated by Amelia Jones Archival and research assistance by Ana Briz, David Frantz, Hannah Grossman, Dominic Johnson, Maddie Phinney *** UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED ALL ITEMS ARE FROM THE RON ATHEY ARCHIVE*** ***NOTE: photographs are credited where authorship is known*** FAÇADE: Rear projection of “Esoterrorist” text by Genesis P’Orridge, edited and video mapped as a word virus, as projected in the final scene of Ron Athey’s Acephalous Monster, “Cephalophore: Entering the Forest,” 2018-19. Video graphics work by Studio Ouroboros, Berlin. ZONE A: Religion/Family This section of the exhibition features a key work expanding on Ron Athey’s family and religious upbringing as a would-be Pentacostal minister: his 2002 live multimedia performance installation Joyce, which is named after Athey’s mother. It also includes elements from Athey’s archive relating to Joyce—including two costumes from the live performance—and his life within and beyond his fundamentalist origin family (such as unpublished writings from his period of recovery in the 1980s, and the numerous flyers advertising fundamentalist revivals he attended). The section is organized around materials that evoke the mix of religiosity and dysfunctional (sexualized and incestuous) family dynamics Athey experienced as a child and wrote about in some of his autobiographical writings that are included in the catalogue, including Mary Magdalene Footwashing Set (1996), which was included in a group show at Western Project in Los Angeles in 2006 and in the Invisible Exports Gallery “Displaced Person” show in 2012, a former gallery just around the corner from Participant Inc.’s location.
    [Show full text]
  • Georges Bataille's Philosophy of Transgression and the Cinema Of
    Is Mark of the Devil an Example of Transgressive Cinema? Georges Bataille’s Philosophy of Transgression and the Cinema of the 1970s Marcus Stiglegger translated by Laura Melchior Abstract collective moment of fear, and raises the Witchploitation films of the late 1960s – like question of whether or not this could generate a Mark of the Devil (1970) – were often criticised ‘transgressive cinema’. And in particular it asks: for exploiting inquisitorial violence such as are witchploitation films transgressive? torture and rape for the sake of pure sensation. While the exploitative manner of dealing with Keywords: witchploitation, censorship, historically based violence is clearly an issue, at sensation, transgression, taboo, philosophy, the same time the question of what effect these Georges Bataille, exploitation film, violence, depictions of extreme violence might have on torture. the audience should be raised. Every culture has its own defined and accepted limits, which are made by collective agreement. Reaching and transgressing these limits amounts to the transgression of an interdiction, of a taboo. This article discusses the representations in the media of the act of transgression – commonly associated with the work of the French philosopher and novelist Georges Bataille – as a 21 The witchploitation films which followed the useful to delineate a theoretical key to success of Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder understanding this phenomenon. After General (1968) were often criticised for explaining the notion of transgression according exploiting inquisitorial violence such as torture to Georges Bataille, I will contextualise the and rape for the sake of pure sensation. In witchploitation films by analysing several Germany Mark of the Devil (Hexen bis aufs Blut movies relating to this concept and finally gequält, Michael Armstrong, 1970) was banned comment on the transgressive nature of till 2016, and in England this film was a well- Witchfinder General and Mark of the Devil.
    [Show full text]
  • The Critical Impact of Transgressive Theatrical Practices Christopher J
    Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2011 (Im)possibilities of Theatre and Transgression: the critical impact of transgressive theatrical practices Christopher J. Krejci Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Krejci, Christopher J., "(Im)possibilities of Theatre and Transgression: the critical impact of transgressive theatrical practices" (2011). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 3510. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3510 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. (IM)POSSIBILITIES OF THEATRE AND TRANSGRESSION: THE CRITICAL IMPACT OF TRANSGRESSIVE THEATRICAL PRACTICES A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Theatre by Christopher J. Krejci B.A., St. Edward’s University, 1999 M.L.A, St. Edward’s University, 2004 August 2011 For my family (blood and otherwise), for fueling my imagination with stories and songs (especially on those nights I couldn’t sleep). ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my advisor, John Fletcher, for his expert guidance. I would also like to thank the members of my committee, Ruth Bowman, Femi Euba, and Les Wade, for their insight and support.
    [Show full text]
  • Aftershock: the Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive
    HORRORSHOW 5 The Transvaluation of Morality in the Work of Damien Hirst I don’t want to talk about Damien. Tracey Emin1 With these words Tracey Emin deprived the art world of her estimation of her nearest contemporary and perhaps the most notorious artist associated with the young British art phenomenon. Frustrating her interviewer’s attempt to discuss Damien Hirst is of course entirely Emin’s prerogative; why should she be under any obligation to discuss the work of a rival artist in interview? Given the theme of this book, however, no such discursive dispensation can be entertained. Why Damien Hirst? What exactly is problematic about Hirst’s art? It is time to talk about Damien. An early installation When Logics Die (1991) provides a useful starting point for identifying the features of the Hirstean aesthetic. High-definition, post- mortem forensic photographs of a suicide victim, a road accident fatality and a head blown out by a point-blank shotgun discharge are mounted on aluminium above a clinical bench strewn with medical paraphernalia and biohazard material. Speaking to Gordon Burn in 1992, the artist explained that what intrigued him about these images was the incongruity they involve: an obscene content yet amenable to disinterested contemplation in the aesthetic mode as a ‘beautiful’ abstract form. ‘I think that’s what the interest is in. Not in actual corpses. I mean, they’re completely delicious, desirable images of completely undesirable, unacceptable things. They’re like cookery books.’2 Now remember what he’s talking about here. Sustained, speculative and clinically detached, Hirst’s preoccupation with the stigmata of decomposition, disease and mortal suffering may be considered to violate instinctive taboos forbidding pleasurable engagement with the spectacle of death.
    [Show full text]
  • Issue Six Dec. 2017 Angel City Review Foreword
    Issue Six Dec. 2017 Angel City Review Foreword There comes a moment for all of us when we come to understand that truth is not immutable pillar of reality that we were raised to believe in. A teenager begins to understand that not only are there people who do not believe in God but that there are even people who don’t believe in any god. A red-blooded American patriot watches a video of refugees and political prisoners displaced by an autocratic government supported by the United States. A literature student takes a class and learns names like Derrida and Foucault and that maybe words themselves are something of a fiat currency. Learning that things are relative, that context is an, if not the, ultimate arbiter, can be a transcendental experience for the mind and the soul. And yet with every choice, something is gained and something is lost. In our rush to explore the infinite possibilities of our newfound philosophical freedom, we have seen what happens to the people in our wake. Some have been left wounded and ignored in the excitement to declare all things constructs of the mind. Some have used this wave of relativism as a tool of exploitation, equivocating crimes against humanity and the world by declaring them as inevitable or simply a matter of perspective. This way of looking at the multiverses beyond and inside our minds is neither a unquestionable good nor an abject evil. Like any tool, it simply is. And as always, what matters is how we use it. For starters, we cannot forget context.
    [Show full text]
  • Blood Rituals from Art to Murder
    The Sacrificial Aesthetic: Blood Rituals from Art to Murder Dawn Perlmutter Department of Fine Arts Cheyney University of Pennsylvania Cheyney PA 19319-0200 [email protected] [Ed. note 2/2017: Many of the links in this article have become invalid and been removed] The concept of the “sacrificial esthetic” introduced in Eric Gans’s Chronicle No. 184 entitled “Sacrificing Culture” describes a situation in which aesthetic forms remain sacrificial but have evolved from a necessary feature of social organization to a psychological element of the human condition. Gans concludes that art’s sacrificial esthetic is essentially exhausted as a creative force and argues that the future lies with simulations, virtual realities in which the spectator plays a partially interactive role. His most significant claim is that “This end of the ability of the esthetic to discriminate between the sacrificial and the antisacrificial is not the end of art. On the contrary, it liberates the esthetic from the ethical end of justifying sacrifice.” The consequence of the liberation of the ethical justification of sacrifice is the main concern of this essay. Throughout the history of art we have encountered images of blood, from the representations of wounded animals in the cave paintings of Lascaux through century after century of brutal Biblical images, through history paintings depicting scenes of war, up through the many films of war, horror, and violence. Blood is now off the canvas, off the screen and sometimes literally in your face. It is no coincidence that this substance has intrigued artists throughout history. Blood is fascinating; it simultaneously represents purity and impurity, the sacred and the profane, life and death.
    [Show full text]
  • Bob Flanagan, Sheree Rose and Masochistic Art During the NEA Controversies
    BRING THE PAIN: Bob Flanagan, Sheree Rose and Masochistic Art during the NEA Controversies by LAURA MACDONALD BFA., Concordia University, 2003 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT GF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES Art History, Visual Art and Theory UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA SEPTEMBER 2005 © Laura MacDonald, 2005 Abstract Poet, performance/installation artist, self-proclaimed "supermasochist" and life-long Cystic Fibrosis sufferer, Bob Flanagan and his partner, dominatrix and fellow artist Sheree Rose created art derived from their personal explorations of sadomasochistic sex acts and relationships. This work used the lens of S/M practice to deal with issues of illness, death, gender and sex. Throughout most of their 15 year collaboration (late 1980- early 1996) Flanagan and Rose lived and worked in relative obscurity, their work being circulated mainly in small subcultural circles. It was during the years of controversies surrounding the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), roughly 1989 to 1997, that Flanagan and Rose experienced unforeseen professional success and fame, propelling them from underground distribution in L.A. to the international art scene. These controversies arose from objections by various rightwing Christian politicians, individuals and groups who felt that the NEA had misused American tax dollars by awarding grants to artists who created and agencies that displayed "obscene" art. Flanagan and Rose were two such artists. This is a case study of the situation of Flanagan and Rose within these controversies, a situation in which there was opportunity, experimentation and heightened awareness despite (or perhaps because of) heated conflicts between opposing sets of ethics, aesthetics and lifestyle.
    [Show full text]
  • UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Dirty Work: Labor, Dissatisfaction and Everyday Life in Contemporary French Literature and Culture (1975-present) Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9586x4bj Author Fronsman-Cecil, Dorthea Margery Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Dirty Work: Labor, Dissatisfaction and Everyday Life in Contemporary French Literature and Culture (1975-present) A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in French and Francophone Studies by Dorthea Margery Fronsman-Cecil 2018 © Copyright by Dorthea Margery Fronsman-Cecil 2018 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Dirty Work: Labor, Dissatisfaction and Everyday Life in Contemporary French Literature and Culture (1975-present) by Dorthea Margery Fronsman-Cecil Doctor of Philosophy in French and Francophone Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2018 Professor Lia N. Brozgal, Chair “Dirty Work: Labor, Dissatisfaction and Everyday Life in Contemporary French Literature and Culture (1975-present),” is an analysis of the representation of everyday activities – namely, of work, leisure, and consumerism – in contemporary French novels and other cultural productions. This dissertation examines how these contemporary texts use narrative, generic, and stylistic experiments to represent cynicism and dissatisfaction with everyday life as the consequences of neoliberal
    [Show full text]
  • Ouch – Pain and Performance Curated by Live Art Development Agency “I
    Ouch – Pain and Performance Curated by Live Art Development Agency “I see pain as an inevitable byproduct of interesting performance.” Dominic Johnson According to Wikipedia ‘pain’ is an “unpleasant feeling often caused by intense or damaging stimuli…(it) motivates the individual to withdraw from damaging situations and to avoid similar experiences in the future.” But for many artists and audiences the opposite is just as true, and pain within the context of performance is a challenging, exhilarating and profound experience. Ouch is a collection of documentation and artists’ films looking at pain and performance – the pain artists might cause themselves within the course of their work, whether intentional or not, and the experiences of audiences as they are invited to inflict pain on artists or are subjected to pain and discomfort themselves. The selected works feature eminent and ground breaking artists whose practices address provocative issues from the lived experiences of illness, to representations of the aging female body, cosmetic surgery, addiction and self harm, animalistic impulses, and treacherous fire stunts, and what can happen when you invite audiences to be complicit in challenging embodied actions. Please note that this screening contains documentation of some historical performances for which the films are of variable quality. This screening also contains strong images, including blood and nudity. With many thanks to all of the featured artists for permission to show their work, to Sheree Rose and Janez Janša, and to Martin O’Brien. Running time 35’ approx. (on loop) Bob Flanagan (USA) Cystic Fibrosis Song 1990’s 1’32” A short film of Bob Flanagan parodying a famous Disney song to convey his experiences of living with Cystic Fibrosis.
    [Show full text]