Seminário Internacional Retornos do Real: cinema e pensamento contemporâneos

20/08/2009
CONFERÊNCIAS E MESAS-REDONDAS/LECTURES AND PANELS


09:00 – Mesa-redonda/Panels
Modalidades do Real/Panel Modalities of Realism
Ismail Xavier (Universidade de São Paulo)
Yingjin Zhang (University of California, San Diego)
mediador: Denilson Lopes



Ismail Xavier
O Exemplar e o Contingente no Teatro das Evidências

O binômio indexalidade-iconicidade postula(va) a imagem e o som do cinema como evidência de um confronto
com o Real que, por enquadramento e montagem, recebe(ia)m os ajustes portadores de sentidos. Filmes
contemporâneos exibem, entre outras estratégias, procedimentos miméticos afinados à narrativa clássica que
busca o exemplar (Ônibus 174), jogos de cena de um cinema-ensaio que explora o contingente e uma
exploração incisiva do estatuto das “evidências”, que embaralha esses dois pólos, não excluída a imagem digital
(Serras da desordem). Modalidades de realismo?

The Exemplary and the Contingent in the Theatre of Evidence

The binary indexicality vs. iconicity has taken, at least until now, the image and sound of cinema as evidence of
a confrontation with the Real, which, by way of framing and montage, received the necessary adjustments in
order to turn meaningful. Contemporary films exhibit, among other strategies, mimetic procedures akin to a
classical narrative in search of the exemplary (Ônibus 174), scenic games proper to a film-essayism that
explores the contingent (Jogo de cena – scene game – being the title of Eduardo Coutinho’s latest work, to
mention but one example), and an incisive exploration of the status of the ‘evidence’ that holds these two poles
in tension, including the use of digital imagery (Serras da desordem). Modalities of realism?

Yngjin Zhang
Paisagens em Movimento
Realidade, Visualidade e Translocalidade nos Filmes de Jia Zhangke

Esta comunicação analisa os filmes de Jia Zhangke, discutindo a realidade, a visualidade e a translocalidade. A
noção de “paisagens em movimento” refere-se ao fato de a natureza e cultura específicas de um lugar serem
crescentemente marcadas pelo capital translocal e pelos fluxos de trabalho. E, algumas vezes, a visualidade
cinemática é o meio fundamental para capturar o Real em transformação. Paisagens em movimento, portanto,
implicam na complexa negociação entre o artista, o Real e a tecnologia visual por meio de uma rede translocal.

Landscapes in Motion
Reality, Visuality and Translocality in Jia Zhangke’s Film

This paper approaches Jia Zhangke’s films in terms of reality, visuality and translocality. The idea of
“landscapes in motion” refer to the fact that nature and culture specific to a locality are increasingly
subjugated to translocal capital and labor flows and that sometimes cinematic visuality is the ultimate means of
capturing the Real in transformation. Landscapes in motion thus imply the complex negotiation between the
artist, the Real and visual technology through a translocal network.


10:30 – Conferência/Keynote Paper
Ivone Margulies (City University of New York)
apresentador e debatedor: Álvaro Fernández Bravo



A Presença Reencenada no Cinema Contemporâneo

Reencenação, definida como uma encenação que uma pessoa faz de eventos em que tenha tomado parte, é um
gênero performativo, próximo às narrativas de testemunho. Nas últimas duas décadas, a presença insubstituível
da pessoa Real tornou-se crescentemente conspícuo como um instrumento crítico para articular consciência e
história no cinema contemporâneo. Quero discutir a natureza e os usos dessa presença, analisando alguns filmes
contemporâneos, assim como a figura particularmente opaca e enigmática de Carapiru, índio da tribo Awa
Guaia, que reencena sua história no filme Serras da Desordem (2007), de Andrea Tonacci.

The Reenacted Presence in contemporary cinema

Reenactment, defined as the acting out, by a person of events in which she had taken part is a performative
genre close to the testimonial account. In the past two decades the unique, non-substitutable presence of the
original person has become increasingly conspicuous as a critical instrument to articulate consciousness and
history in contemporary cinema. I mean to interrogate the nature and uses of this presence by looking at a few
contemporary film examples as well as the particularly opaque enigmatic figure-that of Carapiru, an Indian
from the Awa Guaja tribe who reenacts his story in Andrea Tonacci’s 2007 film Serras da Desordem.



11:45 – Mesa-redonda/Panels
Repensando o Documentário / Panel Rethinking the Documentary
Andréa França (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro)
Emilio Bernino (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad del Cine)
Mediador: Álvaro Fernandez Bravo


Andrea França
O Cinema Documentário e o Retorno Daquilo que Foi

Certos documentários contemporâneos têm feito da repetição um modo de projetar a possibilidade da diferença
em direção ao já terminado, isto é, ao passado. A partir do cinema brasileiro recente, minha proposta é discutir
certas modalidades expressivas de que fazem uso os filmes como forma de tornar visível a repetição – de
situações, falas, encontros, gestos e emoções – e garantir a possibilidade daquilo que já ocorreu, assim como
uma outra relação com as imagens de interpelação realista da mídia.

The Documentary and the Return of What Has Been

Certain contemporary documentaries have turned repetition into a mode of projecting the possibility of a
difference with respect to that which has already terminated, in other words, the past. With a views to recent
Brazilian cinema, my proposal is to discuss certain modalities of expression employed by these films as a way
of visibilizing repetition: situations, modes of speech, encounters, gestures, emotions – warranting the ongoing
possibility of what-has-been, at the same time as proposing a different relation with the mass – media’s images
of realist interpellation.

Emilio Bernini
Una Arqueología de la Imagen: el Documental de Found Footage

El documental found footage revela que la imagen de archivo, con la que se alimentó históricamente el
documental en sus formas más objetivas, no es más que un uso positivo de la imagen, unívoco, fundamentado
en su caracter indicial. En el posdocumental, en cambio, la condición indicial de la imagen fotográfica o
cinematográfica es a la vez aquello que afirma su sentido asignado en un primer grado y aquello mismo que
también permite negarlo o deconstruirlo.

An Archaeology of the Image: The “Found Footage” Documentary

The found footage documentary reveals that the archival image, on which the documentary in its most objective
forms has historically relied in crucial ways, is but a positivizing use of an image taken as univocal, based on
its indexical character. In the postdocumentary, on the contrary, the indexical condition of the photographic or
cinematographic image is at once that which affirms its meaning assigned in the original context and that
which allows to deny or deconstruct the former.



13:30 – Almoço/Lunch

15:30 – Conferência/Keynote Paper
Laura Marks (Dena Wosk University)
Apresentador e debatedor: Maurício Lissovsky



Desdobrando o Real: Mediação como um Tecido Conectivo

Como podemos pensar em mediação, não como uma barreira para o Real, mas como um tecido conectivo
contínuo entre o espectador e o observado? Esta palestra propõe uma estética do cinema, centrada nos
movimentos de dobra e desdobramento; o conceito de dobra como uma forma de mediação, presente no
pensamento de Deleuze, Leibniz e no neoplatonismo. Uma fenomenologia das mídias como envworlding,
desenvolvido a partir do pensamento de Heidegger, por Vivian Sobchack, também contribue para essa
perspectiva. Testarei o conceito em trabalhos de cinema e de mídias digitais.

Unfolding from the Real: Mediation as Connective Tissue

How can we think of mediation not as a barrier to the Real but as a continuous, connective tissue between the
beholder and the beheld? This talk proposes an enfolding-unfolding aesthetics for cinema. The concept of the
fold as a form of mediation arises from the thought of Deleuze, Leibniz, and Neoplatonism. A phenomenology of
media as enworlding, developed from Heidegger’s thought by Vivian Sobchack, also informs this approach. I
will test this concept on contemporary works in cinema and digital media.



16:45 – Mesa-redonda/Panels
Encruzilhadas do Novo Cinema Argentino /
Panel New Argentine Film at the Crossroads
Ana Amado (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
David Oubiña (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad del Cine e New York)
Mediador: Jens Andermann



Ana Amado
Visitas Guiadas al Território de los Desclasado

Analizare las representaciones post crisis en algunas películas argentinas recientes, que ponen el enfasis en
movimientos, actitudes, voces locales, prácticas regionales y otros rasgos que definen audiovisualmente “lo
popular”. A partir de un realismo en primer término espacial, y al mismo tiempo “encarnado”, estas poéticas
de exhibición del otro los transforma en objetos etnográficos. Ya no desde el registro de observadores
ventrílocuos o sabihondos, sino con una suerte de contraestrategia que consiste en situarse en la
ambivalencia de la representación misma y contestarla con los argumentos y los codigos de los
representados...

Guided Tours to the Territory of the Dispossessed

I shall analyze representations in the aftermath of the crisis in some recent Argentine films, which emphasize
movements, attitudes, local voices, regional practices and other features that audio-visually define ‘the popular’. On the
basis of a primarily spatial, yet at the same time ‘embodied’, realism, these poetics of exhibiting the other transform
these into objects of ethnography. However, the register here is not one of ventriloquous or onmiscient observers but
rather a kind of counter-strategy, located in the ambivalence of a representation that is being contested by the
arguments and codes of those represented.

David Oubiña
Riesgos y Desafíos del Cine Argentino Reciente

En la década del 90 un nuevo cine surgió en la Argentina: eran films independientes, jóvenes, originales, provocadores.
Frente a las recetas solemnes y artificiales del viejo cine, uno de los grandes méritos de esa renovación consistió en
desplegar una mirada frontal y sin prejuicios sobre lo Real. Sin embargo, en los últimos años, ciertos hallazgos iniciales
han ido cristalizándose a menudo en fórmulas cómodas y vacías. El nuevo cine también ha terminado por generar sus
lugares comunes.

Risks and Challenges of Recent Argentine Cinema

In the 1990s a new cinema emerged in Argentina, made up of independent, young, original, provocative films.
Challenging the solemn and artificial formulas of the old cinema, one of the great merits of this renewal was the
introduction of a frontal and unprejudiced perspective on the Real. In recent years, however, some of these
initial achievements have started to settle down into routine and vacuous formulas. The new cinema has started
to generate its own commonplaces.



18:30 – Palestra de Encerramento/Closing Lecture
Karl Erik Schöllhammer (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro)
Apresentador e mediador: Jens Andermann



Além ou Aquém do Realismo de Choque?

A evocação de um “Retorno do Real”, feita por Hal Foster, em 1996, foi o pontapé inicial para a retomada do
interesse pelas formas de realismo extremo nas artes visuais contemporâneas. Rapidamente, a abordagem
expandiu-se para a literatura e para o cinema, enfocando temas e estilos de ruptura representativa e efeitos
estéticos de choque, por um lado, e linguagens híbridas entre documentalismo e encenação ficcional, por outro.
Partindo do mapeamento das formas históricas do realismo, a palestra discutirá os limites do realismo
traumático e o alcance da busca contemporânea por efeitos e afetos que se valem da presença material e do
agenciamento performático nas novas apostas de realismo.

Towards or Beyond a Realism of Shock?

The evocation of a “Return of the Real”, proclaimed by Hal Foster in 1996, was the point of departure for a
renewed interest in the forms of extreme realism in contemporary visual arts. This approach quickly crossed
over into literature and film, focusing on themes and styles of the break with representation and the aesthetic
effects of shock, on the one hand, and on the hybridities between documentarism and fictional staging, on the
other. The paper starts by mapping-out the historical forms of realism, moving on to discuss the limits of
traumatic realism and the scope of the present search for effects and affects in proposals of a new realism that
make use of forms of material presence and performative engagement.

call for papers, performances and workshops

thinking about a new project for the event

O Simpósio Nacional ABCiber é uma iniciativa da ABCiber – Associação Brasileira de Pesquisadores em Cibercultura, entidade científico-cultural, interdisciplinar, de âmbito nacional, sem fins lucrativos.

Em sua terceira edição, o evento é organizado pelo Grupo de Pesquisa em Comunicação e Práticas de Consumo (certificado no diretório do CNPq) e promovido pelo Programa de Mestrado em Comunicação e Práticas de Consumo da Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing – ESPM/SP.

O Simpósio reunirá, em três dias consecutivos, inúmeros artistas, coletivos, pesquisadores e alunos de Graduação e Pós-graduação de Ciências Humanas e Ciências Sociais Aplicadas de todo o país.

Por meio dos eixos cultural/artístico e científico, o evento tem como objetivo promover a reflexão e a circulação do conhecimento e das produções artísticas no âmbito da cibercultura.

.

Data: 16, 17 e 18 de novembro de 2009
Local: Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing – ESPM
Campus Prof. Francisco Gracioso (Rua Dr. Álvaro Alvim, 123 – Vila Mariana)

Jill Magid

Fri, Feb 20, 2009
7:00 PM

New Museum theater (directions)

Permission as Material: A talk with Jill Magid

Part of New Silent

Discussions

Jill Magid is a visual artist working in a variety of mediums, including literature, video, sculpture, photography, and performance. She seeks intimate relations with impersonal structures. Magid is also intrigued by hidden information, being public as a condition for existence, and intimacy in relation to power and observation. At this event, Magid will discuss recent projects and touch upon her new body of work currently in progress.

Jill Magid has had solo exhibitions at Stroom, The Hague; Gagosian Gallery, New York; Yvon Lambert, Paris; Centre D'arte Santa Monica; and Berlin and Sparwasser, Berlin. She has lectured and performed widely at venues including Orchard, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Eyebeam, and the Bowery Poetry Club.

exposition sophie calle SP

uploading dreams

Início do Debate que fizemos na ECO 05/11
Em breve na íntegra no nosso canal vimeo

MMC LUKA (Pula, Croatia)

© Jonas Dahlberg
Film still from View Trough a Park, 2009.
Single channel video installation.
Dimensions variable.

Architecture and Film: subjective spaces
MMC LUKA, Pula, Croatia
Cinemaniac is a sidebar program of the Pula Film Festival since 2002. The exhibition presents innovations and ideas concerning the presentation of moving images - works of film and video in the gallery context, where the infrastructure of the film festival provides a contextual and organizational platform as well as collaborative model. The exhibition works as an active context that enables the presentation of works of art. It is a meeting place that integrates social, cultural, technological, media, and aesthetic aspects, a meeting point for art, artists, institutions, and the audience. It investigates the relationship between film and visual arts by presenting recent Croatian and international production, as well as anthological videos, experimental films and multimedia installations.

Playing with the tensions between the dimensions of time and space, film codes and conventions create the view and the world, object and illusion, whereas alternative, experimental and artist' film explores and deconstructs internal laws and relations towards outer formative structures. This year's cinemaniac exhibition tries to point to a specific relation between the moving images (film, video) and architecture, and the meanings they produce, as it is formed around the manners in which specific films, film motifs or sequences, represent a suggestive, psychological and symbolic quality of architecture. It is in fact the interplay of (modern) architecture and film (cinematographic representation). The space here is perceived as one of the basic means of expression and as the place where the meanings are structured , whereas film language, with its means of expression and syntactic principles, enables special understanding of both space and reality. The space is thus the scene of a specific dramatic happening, a historic event or a life setting presentation and it becomes the object of an autonomous visual experiment.

In the exhibited works by four artists - View Through a Park by Jonas Dahlberg, August 2008 by Ra di Martino, Interiors by Ursula Mayer and The Boy with a Magic Horn by Damir Očko – presented spaces represent performance scenes for open narrative forms – places where camera movements, ambiance, architectural structures, music and dialogue meet with the protagonists. Relations between architectural structures and the possibility of social interaction, irrespective of whether a human being - a fictional character is present or not, can be discerned. In the scenes with or without dialogue, just like in spaces void of people and their physical presence, the presence of a subject is coded through the view, by means of a camera's technical characteristic – the lens – the intruder, a watching eye. The camera becomes an illusion mechanism for the creation of a renaissance space, a movement compatible with human eye and the presentation ideology that revolves around the perception of a subject. The darkness of the cinema auditorium or the setting of a dimmed gallery space play with the voyeuristic imagination of the audience and accentuate the illusion of sneaking into a private world.


Istarska 30,
Pula,
Croatia
Phone: 385 52 224 316
Fax: 385 52 388 308
Contact: Mirjana Grahovac
info@mmcluka.hr

www.mmcluka.hr

19th July- 9th August 2009
Opening:
Sunday, 19th July 2009, 20 h
Jonas Dahlberg, Ra di Martino, Ursula Mayer, Damir Očko
Curator: Branka Benčić

Multiple Views:

"Dan Graham: Beyond" at the Whitney Museum

By Carolyn Kane on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 12:04 pm.

Image: Dan Graham, Public Space / Two Audiences, 1976

“[E]xperience is not arrayed before me as if I were god, it is lived by me from a certain point of view; I am not the spectator, I am involved, and it is my involvement in a point of view which makes possible both the finiteness of my perception and its opening out upon the complete world as a horizon of every perception.”

–––Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962
(Translation by Colin Smith)

Artist Dan Graham (born 1942) has embraced a wide range of media and genres including film, video, performance, installation, architecture (he collaborated with Jeff Wall in 1989 to build Children’s Pavilion), women’s magazines (Figurative—made in 1965 and reproduced in Harper’s Bazaar in 1968), and rock music (where he has collaborated with musicians such as Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth). Graham is well known for his documentary Rock My Religion (1982-84), a fifty-two minute video that explores the religious and spiritual tendencies underlying the American obsession with rock music. In the exhibition catalog for Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty, Diedrich Diederichsen claims that this video is “one of the most important texts on the theory of rock music.” Rock My Religion, as well as many other of these interdisciplinary projects are included in Graham’s current solo show, Dan Graham: Beyond, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

Alongside his versatile practice, Graham has also been influenced by a wide variety of thinkers. Chrissie Iles lists these as including the literary, anthropological, and scientific fields, such as the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Gregory Bateson, Herbert Marcuse, Kurt Lewin, Wilhelm Reich, and Margaret Mead. The show at the Whitney takes account of these multidisciplinary footholds to great success, but for this review, I will focus on a particular niche of Graham’s work: his early performances and video installations from the 1970s, and the topical issues of performance art, the human body, and holistic perception that accompanies them.

The Merleau-Ponty quote noted above, according to Rosalind Krauss in “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalist Museums,” marks a “radically contingent subject” that is caught within the horizon of unfolding, yet fragmentary, perceptions. For both, this seemingly paradoxical point of view is also indicative of an orientation in the world that prioritizes the body as the primary vehicle for experience and knowledge. This premise, it seems to me, is also one that underlies Graham’s early performances, and is evident Two Consciousness Projections(s) (1972), Public Space / Two Audiences (1976) and Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay (1974), all of which are included in the Beyond exhibition.

In Two Consciousness Projections(s) (1972), documentation of which is on display at Whitney, the bodies of two participants, and the audience, are the subject and site of the artwork. In the piece, a naked woman is seated in a chair, facing a monitor that displays her image on it, in real time. The image is being transmitted from a man who is fully dressed and stands in front of her, holding a video camera. He is positioned behind the monitor. As the woman watches the live feedback image of herself, she tries to articulate to the audience what is going on in her “conscious” mind. The man, whom she does not know, also begins describing what he sees as he watches her through the camera lens. The audience is perpendicular to them, watching and listening to both performers and the monitor.

Images: Dan Graham, Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay, 1974 (Source: SFMOMA)

Two Consciousness Projections(s) demonstrates that even in one mind, consciousness is already multiple. Not only is a discrepancy between internal thought and verbal articulation exposed, but there is also an inconsistency between the girl’s visual reflection and her internal dialogue––while it may not be obvious, it is the starting point for the fragmentation of perception in the piece. Secondly, the fact that the man and woman influence each other’s perception and reality, through a live, mediated feedback circuit, is doubled by the fact that, as Graham describes it, the “audience performs as a superego.”

Chrissie Iles, in her essay “You are the Information: Dan Graham and Performance,” published in the Whitney’s exhibition catalog for Beyond, has contextualized this performance as a feminist one. She writes, the performance “disrupts the traditional dynamic between male and female. The female deflects the male gaze by commenting on her own live image, thereby altering and potentially controlling it.” Made at the height of the women’s liberation movement in 1972, Graham suggests, also in Iles’ essay, that the woman in the piece is indeed “more powerful than the man, as her subject and object are not separated. Whereas the more the man (to himself) strives to be objective, that much more does he appear to be unconsciously subjective to any observer on the outside.” This sophisticated notion delineates the distinction between the subject and object positions, yet also maintains that they are still connected. The paradox of being both one and many is pushed further in a second performance of the piece in 1975 at NSCAD, where both male and female performers are in the nude. This alteration effectively inverts the traditional art historical signifiers of the male gaze, while also maintaining them. Both male and female play object and subject, to themselves and for each other.

Beyond issues of feminism, Graham’s use of naked bodies is a recurrent motif. Iles suggests this has come as a result of his own experience in forms of body therapy, and in particular, from having undergone the therapy of Wilhelm Reich, whose techniques, she notes, sometimes involved “seeing patients in the nude.” A strategy that was no doubt in tune with the general tendency of the era; to view bodies and behaviors as forms of expression and communication systems, such as found in the work of Bateson, Mead, and even at the crux of Wiener’s cybernetics. Graham’s interest in bodies, people (performers, audience members) as communication systems equally reinforces Merleau-Ponty’s notion that it is by way of one’s physical involvement in a situation that makes perception and knowledge possible.

In this 1970s milieu, new electronic technologies also garnered an opening of perception in space and body consciousness. For Graham, this multifaceted human-machine vision was found with the then new media of video. This motif appears in both Public Space /Two Audiences (1976) and Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay (1974 / 1993), both of which are fully reinstalled at the Whitney.

Opposing Mirrors uses the body to perceive and understand in a different, slightly less aggressive way than Two Consciousness Projections(s). The piece consists of two cameras set on top of two television monitors. Both the camera lenses and the monitors face a mirror. Each mirror-TV-camera system are positioned at two opposing sides of the room. So if I stand behind, but just to the side, of one monitor, my reflection is still caught in the mirror and the camera lens picks up the image. The cameras are also programmed to transmit their images to the monitors on five-second delay. Because of this delay, visitors could stand in front of one camera, not see themselves, and walk away. However, the person following them in line, as was the case when I visited the installation, would see their picture, and not my own. Not only is the expectation to see an image of myself undermined, but when an image of someone else appears on the screen, a strange collision and unexpected form of communication is elicited.

The piece does not use video feedback for its material or technical qualities. Instead, video is used as a vehicle for social communication––to rupture the normative silence and distance between strangers in a museum or gallery setting. In place of the presumed alienation between strangers, the installation’s capture and delay sets up a system of salutations between visitors. It is an enforced, non-verbal communication that breaks perceived boundaries in favor of proliferating connectivity, turning a line into a loop.

The myth of autonomous and isolated subjectivity is also undermined in Public Space /Two Audiences (1976), an installation that consists of a four-sided room with large ceiling-to-floor mirrors set up on two opposing sides of a room. In the middle is a thick transparent glass so that you cannot walk from one side to the other, and in each half of the room is a door to go outside, and back into the gallery. The instructions outside the installation instruct viewers to stay in the room for ten minutes.

Almost immediately after entering the space, the sounds of the museum disappear, bright white walls enclose you, and only the people on the other side of the glass can observe you––and you them, resulting in discomfort for those inside. I did not meet the ten-minute requirement. I quickly discerned that I was supposed to become a performer for the “audience” on the other side of the glass wall, while they were to become an audience for the people on my side of the glass. Public Space /Two Audiences is reminiscent of observation booths, where a hidden observer watches people. Yet in this case the power dynamic, as in Opposing Mirrors, is simultaneously upheld and inverted, as all visitors were made observers and subject to observation. Public Space /Two Audiences, also very much like Opposing Mirrors, places viewers in direct contact with the outside, without language, and only the visual façade to negotiate. All three of these pieces express conceptual and literal points of view typical of 1970s performance art and video installation, indicative of a time informed by the rise of systems based, non-verbal, visual communications and fractured, yet multiple, states of consciousness. These tendencies, apparent in this moment within Graham’s career, are an important precursor to the accelerated, multiple perspectives that mark contemporary experience.

Dan Graham: Beyond is on view at the Whitney Museum until October 11, 2009.