crit theoryII list

Imprint/Index/Trace/Mark/Photograph

AIB Critical Theory II Seminar January 2008

Michael Newman

Course Description

The use of techniques of imprinting and casting from the body and from objects has been pervasive in modern art. Introducing ways of engendering objects independently of controlling intention and open to chance effects, such techniques lend to the thing a traumatic immediacy and raise questions of the relation between life and death, presence and absence, mourning and the uncanny. The imprint has also been used as the basis for an alternative to an art history based on representation and idea. The index, a sign physically related to its referent, has been proposed as the basis to link sculptural practice of the 1970s to a model based on photography. The class will follow four threads: First, a consideration and critique of the idea of origin, and its relation to the mark and the trace; second, a consideration of the relations between mark, sign and trace; third, the implications of the trace and imprint to life and death, with a particular focus on casting and the photograph; and fourth, the trace considered as trace of the other and of the feminine.

Requirements

A. The texts are required reading for the class. You will be expected to participate actively in a discussion of these texts.

B. A short illustrated presentation in class related to one of the readings

+++ = available as download

Three books need to be purchased.

Session 1: The Trace in the Origin of Drawing

Reading:

***Pliny, Natural History: Books XXXIII-XXXV, ed. G. P. Goold, trans. H. Rackham, 1995 ed., X vols., vol. IX, The Loeb Classical Library (London: Harvard University Press, 1952), Book XXXV, 151-152 according to the paragraph numbers to the left of the Latin text); also available in Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, trans. John F. Healy (London: Penguin, 1991), p.336, §151. A complete translation of Pliny's Natural History is available online at [Note: their server is currently down]

+++Michael Newman, "The Traces and Marks of Drawing" in The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act, Selected from the Tate Collection, edited by Catherine de Zegher, London: Tate Publishing and New York: The Drawing Center, 2003, pp. 93-108.

Session 2: The Index, Stain, and Sign

Reading:

+++Rosalind Krauss, "Notes on the Index" in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: MIT, 1985), pp.196-219.

+++Georges Didi-Huberman, "The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain)," October, Summer 1984 1984

+++James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Chapter 1: "Marks, Traces, Traits, Contours, Orli, and Splendores", pp. 3-46.

Session 3: The Relic, Life Cast, Death Mask and Photograph

Reading:

+++Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," Standard Edition, Vol. 14, pp.243-258.

+++André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image", in What is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp.9-16

BUY: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida : Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

Session 4: The Trace of the Other and of the Feminine

Reading:

+++Emmanuel Levinas, "The Trace of the Other," in Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)

+++Edward Casey, "Levinas on Memory and the Trace", in J.C.Sallis, G. Moneta and J. Taminiaux eds., The Collegium Phaenomenologicum (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), pp.240-255.

BUY: Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993)

Buy: Julia Kristeva, and Toril Moi, The Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), read section I, "Linguistics, Semiotics, Textuality" esp. pp.62-136.

+++Michael Newman, "Imprint and Rhizome in the Work of Cristina Iglesias," in Iwona Blazwick ed., Cristina Iglesias (Museu Serralves, Barcelona, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2002-03), pp. 121-164 [availabie as author's MS]