Yearning for Presence: The Live Body in History

Western aesthetics has, since the inception of the
notion of art in the early modern period, pivoted around a belief in presence,
in the artist as divinely inspired genius who invests the art work with ongoing
“presence”, forever recalling his subjectivity and being
through the forms and appearance of the work. 
Such claims of “presence”, as Jacques
Derrida has pointed out, are motivated by the desire to substantiate the
superiority of humans, and to deny the inexorability of our mortality. In this
schema, which came to its apotheosis but also began to be challenged in
European modernism, art becomes the means through which we imagine our
transcendence. At the same time, performance studies has also begun to rely on
claims of “presence”, but in the
case of live art, to claim authenticity – if “the artist is present,” then we
presumably have full access to her “being” and thus an “authentic” experience
of the artist/other.  This paper takes
apart both sets of claims, using specific examples from art and performance to
show the impossibility of presence as a truth claim. (Amelia Jones)

Lecture will be in English.

Organisation: Maska Institute; In collaboration with:
City of Women, Škuc Gallery.

Free entry.