“Taking Place:” Affect and the Archive from the Avant-Garde to Contemporary Artistic Practice Restricted; Files Only
Signorini, Federica (Summer 2023)
Published
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the relationship between affect (elaborated in the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Freudian psychoanalysis) and the archive (elaborated in the work of Jacques Derrida) through a comparative study performed across national traditions and disciplines of artworks produced between the beginning of the 20th Century and contemporary artistic practice. “Taking Place” develops the theory that in the encounter with the work of art an archival space is created, the conditions of which allow for the disturbing force of affect to be read as taking place. Affect is here understood as a singular, absolute sentiment that arises in the moment, with no relation to the past or future, and, addressed to nobody, says one thing: it is here. Drawing from Derrida’s provocation of the problem affect poses to the archive and historical scholarship, this dissertation considers the conditions of an archival site that attempts to situate affect in a manner that does not silence, or make sense of it, but attempts to witness its ambivalence and inarticulation.
Each chapter of this dissertation considers how artists have elaborated, through their practice, varying relationships to the past, most significantly, to pasts of historical trauma: both collective and individual. I consider the work of cinematic work of Marguerite Duras, Louise Bourgeois’s sculptural installations (Chapter 1), H.D.’s literary memoir (Chapter 2), works of Italian Futurism (Chapter 3), and Cecilia Vicuña’s reinvention of Andean Indigenous aesthetics (Chapter 4). I consider the relationship to the past each of these works presents as they bring together historical traumas—of world war, colonialism, dictatorship—with a rewriting of the self. This project forges connections amidst opposition and discord by studying divergent ethico-socio-political commitments. While not all the artistic practices collected here aim to mourn or bear witness to the past, when read alongside one another they produce a consideration of what an attempt to bear just witness must reckon with. And so, the archival space here addressed aims to witness the past by hearing the disturbance of affect without presenting a cohesive teleological narrative that claims to speak on behalf of the subjugated or to recover an irrecuperable loss.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION: “TAKING PLACE”
CHAPTER 1 IS ANYBODY HOME? STAGED ENCOUNTERS WITH NO-BODY
I Auto-topo-écriture and the very place of (re-)writing
II
Cell (Choisy)(-le-Roi)
Bourgeois to Duras, in the name of the father
India Song: Neither India nor Neuilly
III
Voyeurism and the (non)place of the Cadaver
Dis-location Takes Place Nowhere
CHAPTER 2 “WRITING ON THE WALL:” AN IMPRESSION
I Origin Story
II Impression
III “Repression” “Répression”
CHAPTER 3 FUTURIST MOVEMENTS
I La Donna Futurista Rosa Rosà: a marked repetition
II Una donna con tre anime in nove parti
III Multiplicity Exaggerated Growth: Beginnings for Further Work
CHAPTER 4 CO-CREATION AND CON-DESTRUCTION: ENCOUNTERING CECILIA VICUÑA’S ARTISTIC PRACTICE
Re-framing “A few explanatory words”
Situating Affect in The Archive
Con-Destructive Embrace of The Precario I
Encounter, 2019
Con-Destructive Embrace of The Precario II
Co-Creation—Con-Destruction
CODA: FIG. A FINAL CONCLUDING EVENT, REMARK
About this Dissertation
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File download under embargo until 16 August 2029 | 2023-07-03 12:51:06 -0400 | File download under embargo until 16 August 2029 |
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