<p>Cover artwork: Bownik, <em>Passage</em>, 140 x 240 cm, 2013, from the series <em>Colleagues</em>, courtesy of the artist</p>
<p>Cover artwork: Bownik, <em>Passage</em>, 140 x 240 cm, 2013, from the series <em>Colleagues</em>, courtesy of the artist</p>

No. 15: Theatricality

Managing editor: Krzysztof Pijarski

Cover artwork: Bownik, Passage, 140 x 240 cm, 2013, from the series Colleagues, courtesy of the artist

This issue was supported by the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education, from the funds of the program for the popularization of scholarship in 2016

Table of Contents

Introduction

  1. Theatricality Today?

    , ”Theatricality Today?”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 15 (2017), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2016.15.754

    Introduction to issue 15 of View.

Close-up

  1. Art and Objecthood

    Michael Fried
    Michael Fried, ”Art and Objecthood”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 15 (2017), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2016.15.706

    An excerpt from the first complete, critical Polish translation of "Art and Objecthood" which will be published as a whole in the forthcoming book entitled "Michael Fried. An Archeology of MOdernism" by Krzysztof Pijarski.

  2. Theatricality and Sincerity

    Tim Gough
    Tim Gough, ”Theatricality and Sincerity”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 15 (2017), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2016.15.756

    The essay looks in detail at Fried's concept of theatricality and analyses it in the light of his later writings on absorption. His arguments against minimalism are shown to be subject to a wider concern regards the ontology of the art work and the shift to a non-representational ontology that minimalism expresses. This in turn leads to a conclusion about the status of the subject and sincerity.

  3. The V-Girls: Feminism and the Authentic Subject after Post-structuralism

    Becky Bivens
    Becky Bivens, ”The V-Girls: Feminism and the Authentic Subject ”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 15 (2017), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2016.15.758

    The feminist performance troupe the V-Girls satirized the conventions of academia and trends in deconstructionist, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and feminist thought in their three performances, “Academia in the Alps: In Search of Swiss Mis(s)” (1988-92), “The Question of Manet’s Olympia: Posed and Skirted” (1989-92), and “The V-Girls: Daughters of the ReVolution,” (1993-96). In their earliest two performances, the V-Girls simultaneously identify with and question post-structuralism, suggesting that its critique of humanism’s autonomous subject actually bolsters academics’ claim to individual mastery. By explaining away her beliefs as effects of pre-existing ideologies, the V-Girls suggest, the post-structuralist academic need not risk advancing her convictions or participating in collective action. In their final performance, the V-Girls ask if second-wave feminism provides a salvageable model of the self-identified, authentic subject ready to speak out and work collaboratively. In so doing, they also reveal overlooked parallels between the humanist and second-wave feminist conception of the subject.

  4. Mimicry as Depersonalisation in The Factory

    Agnieszka Sosnowska
    Agnieszka Sosnowska, ”Mimicry as Depersonalisation in The Factory”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 15 (2017), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2016.15.763

    The essay seeks to examine Andy Warhol's Factory as a model for investigating theater in the postmodern era. It asks whether the model of identity construction in the Factory resembles the ways of modeling the identity of an on-stage character in the times of the crisis of modernity, as described by Elinor Fuchs in "The Death of Character'. The author notices that shattering the traditional models of theatricality may lead to unveiling the destructive force of this category, especially when applied to vernacular practices.

  5. Theatricality as the Protean Experience in Hybridised Forms of Contemporary Art

    Mateusz Chaberski
    Mateusz Chaberski, ”Theatricality as the Protean Experience in Hybridised Forms”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 15 (2017), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2016.15.764

    This paper puts forward a model of theatricality as the protean experience in hybridised forms of contemporary art. The author focuses on artistic events that fuse not only different artistic media but also scientific and political discourses and practices of designing new technologies. In the first part of the article, the author employs theoretical findings of the German art theorist Juliane Rebentisch to critically examine the concept of theatricality as establishing a hierarchical relation between human subjects and non-human objects of aesthetic experience (Fried). As Rebentisch succinctly observes, theatricality of installation art becomes an open space of experience in which experimental relations between subjects and objects emerge without any pre-established hierarchy. In the second part of the article, the author problematizes the question of spectatorial experience by referring to new materialist philosophies (Barad, DeLanda, Sabolius) which posit a non-anthropocentric model of experience as an assemblage of different human and non-human elements. From this perspective, the author formulates a concept of theatricality as the protean experience which entails the constant change of status of all human and non-human participants of the artistic events. Theoretical findings are illustrated not only by analyses of particular artistic strategies but rather by experiences of participants in contemporary installation art.

Viewpoint

  1. Marta Ziółek. Shedding the Costume

    Agnieszka Mikulska, Marta Ziółek
    Agnieszka Mikulska, Marta Ziółek, ”Marta Ziółek. Shedding the Costume”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 15 (2017), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2016.15.2053

    A short found-footage film from documentations of pieces by Marta Ziółek, dedicated to the work of the choreographer.

  2. Dance is a Barbarian: The Choreographies of Marta Ziółek

    Katarzyna Słoboda
    Katarzyna Słoboda, ”Dance is a Barbarian: The Choreographies of Marta Ziółek”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 15 (2017), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2016.15.766

    Essay framing the practice of choreographer Marta Ziółek, presented here in the interpretation of film editor Agnieszka Mikulska.

Panorama

  1. The Body's Photographic Afterlives

    Ryan Conrath
    Ryan Conrath, ”The Body's Photographic Afterlives”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 15 (2017), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2016.15.767

    This essay examines the photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher as a novel form of bodily figuration. This could seem like an unusual angle from which to approach the Bechers' work considering the seemingly total absence of human figures in their photographic grids of industrial modernity. Their “typologies,” as the call them, would seem to testify to nothing if not the effacement of the human body from the site of work. And beyond being totally bereft of bodies, the Bechers' photographs strike us for their ineluctable stillness, flatness, and pastness. And yet upon closer reading the flatness of the photographs gives way to a dimensionality, stillness gives way to motion, and the edges of the photographs begin to expand in ways that lend to these typologies a dynamic, almost corporeal quality. I argue that this occurs primarily via the interstitial space that separates the photos from one another. The in-between space of these grids thus serves as a space of movement, across which the spectator imagines bodies to be moving and looking. I understand the Bechers’ practice of figuration as a way of dealing with the profound consequences of the Second World War not only on bodies, but on the terms of their representation.

  2. Artist, Oeuvre, Corpus and Archive: Thinking through Zofia Rydet’s Sociological Record

    Abigail Solomon-Godeau
    Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ”Artist, Oeuvre, Corpus and Archive”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 15 (2017), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2016.15.780

    A reading of Zofia Rydet's Sociological Record with the use of such categories as survey, archive, and in the light of the artist's oeuvre seen as heterogenic and hybrid corpus.

Snapshots

  1. „Don't Sit Down. It's a Trap”. Situation Rooms by Rimini Protokoll

    , ”„Don't Sit Down. It's a Trap”. Situation Rooms by Rimini Protokoll”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 15 (2017), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2016.15.730

    Review of the performance Situation Rooms by the group Rimini Protokoll (2013).

  2. Rhythmics of Modernity

    Magda Roszkowska
    Magda Roszkowska, ”Rhythmics of Modernity”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 15 (2017), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2016.15.737

    Review of two exhibitions from Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź: The Museum of Rhythm and Moved Bodies. Choreographies of Modernity.

  3. Polish People's Republic, Theatre, Revolution

    Tomasz Żukowski
    Tomasz Żukowski, ”Polish People's Republic, Theatre, Revolution”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 15 (2017), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2016.15.741

    Review of the book PRL. Przedstawienia [Polish People's Republic Theatre performances] by Joanna Krakowska (Warszawa 2016).