REGIMES OF THE VISUAL

IMAGES AND EVENTS OF RADICAL WILL

“It is gladly believed that a culture is more attached to its values than to its forms, that these can easily be modified, abandoned, taken up again; that only meaning is deeply rooted. This is to misunderstand … that people cling more to ways of seeing, saying, doing, and thinking, than to what they see, what they think, say or do… In the twentieth century things have taken an unusual turn: the ‘formal’ itself, reflexive work on the system of forms, has become an issue. And a remarkable object of moral hostilities, of aesthetic debates and political clashes.”
Michel Foucault

The course focuses on different regimes and strategies of representing and acting radical will. “Radicality” here is proposed as a term that can be applied to different models, formats and media of artistic and activist practices but also to different modes of critical thinking. What was once coined by the theorist Susan Sontag as “styles of radical will” and looked at only in aesthetic terms today could be taken much further and questioned in the context of social and political potentialities of visual expression and representation of “radical will”.

Some of the central questions to be discussed in this course are whether images can be radical on their own, whether radically disturbing political and social events could be represented only by extreme imagery and how can one match the “radicality” entailed in the events with images? Topics to be discussed will deal with images representing radical events in media, visual art exhibitions and museum collections, public art and monumental sculpture as well as with the construction of new subject positions.

Regimes of the Visual
Univ. Lekt. Dr. Suzana Milevska
Ao.Prof. Dr. Gülsen Bal

Mondays, 11:00-14:00
Start: 28 October 2013
Location: Seminarraum 2, Karlsgasse 11

For further details please see link below