Event overview
The Auto / Bio / Fiction series of talks and seminars continues this month with a focus on the visual arts and the representation of death and disaster
Michael Newman (Professor of Art Writing, Goldsmiths)
“From Portrait to Anti-Portrait: Facing the destruction of humanity”
What happens to the portrait when human existence is in question?
In this talk I bring together two moments of crisis for humanity: the first being the experience of the camps in World War II – both the 'concentrationary' and the death camps – and nuclear destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed by the Cold War; and the second in the present, when the challenge comes from technologies of surveillance and self-monitoring, and accelerating extinction due to climate change.
In both, the representational portrait based on renaissance and enlightenment ideas of sovereignty and the individual is fundamentally challenged, and anti-portraits emerge.
Out of the concentrationary – for which a crucial touchstone is Robert Antelme's book The Human Race – the portrait splits into the face and the head. In the moment of surveillance, self-monitoring, machine learning and AI based facial recognition, other strategies are pursued, including the proxy portrait and 'visual' auto-fiction.
At each moment, the anti-portrait responds to something fundamental at stake, challenging the limits and the abuses of representation and identity.
Sarah Walker (writer and fine artis, Naarm/Melbourne)
"Writing the self in the expanded field: autofiction as a strategy in text-based visual art"
Autofiction allows for a stretching of both form and content in personal writing, making apparent the limits of objectivity and producing a form of representation that allows for abstraction and poetics. These qualities become even more charged when writing moves off the page into the gallery, through text-based visual art.
My practice uses text in installation works to explore my own anxieties around death and disaster. In this talk, I will discuss the affective possibilities of autofiction in the expanded field. I will describe the making of the work Bolt Upright, a large-scale handwritten work which attempts to describe a moment of contending with my own mortality.
The work involves ten thousand words of text that collapse into nested parentheses, producing a tactile rendering of anxieties around death. G. Genette and WJT Mitchell provide a framework of narrative that comprises plot (providing movement) and description (pausing movement). In Bolt Upright, this framework is made tactile. Plot is ragged, disrupted and made insufficient by the limits of memory. Description becomes a way of diving into the overwhelming fabric of recollection that makes up a life. The outcome is a narrative full of gaps, holes and inventions: an autofiction whose chaos strives to convey something of the self that tidy writing cannot. I will discuss the possibilities of language in visual art, and how a thrumming, nested wall of words might offer a truer form of self-portraiture through words than any so-called objective rendering of self.
More information on the speakers and the event
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 23 Nov 2023 | 6:30pm - 8:15pm |
Accessibility
If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.
