Nothing to See Here: Antiretinal Aesthetics in Louise Lawler’s A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture
No próximo dia 24 de março, pelas 16h00, no Aud. A1 (Torre A), da Faculdade de Ciências Sociais (Av. de Berna), terá lugar mais um Seminário Performance e Cognição. Justin Remes, professor na Universidade Estadual de Ciência e Tecnologia de Iowa (EUA), é o convidado; “Nothing to See Here: Antiretinal Aesthetics in Louise Lawler’s A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture” é o tema. A sessão será apresentada por Pedro Florêncio, docente na NOVA FCSH e investigador integrado do ICNOVA.
O evento terá um formato híbrido, pelo que os interessados podem participar presencialmente ou através da plataforma Zoom, aqui.
Abstract: In 1979 the conceptual artist Louise Lawler screened an imageless version of John Huston’s film The Misfits (1961) at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica, California. While most found footage filmmakers appropriate preexisting images, Lawler displays an interest in the appropriation of cinematic sounds. In this talk, I will argue that Lawler’s antiretinal aesthetic was profoundly shaped by the art of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol.
Just as A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture is composed entirely of the sounds of a pre-existing film, this talk will be composed entirely of language from pre-existing texts. In other words, I will present a work of “found scholarship,” in which I construct academic arguments by “remixing” preexisting texts through the use of ellipses and brackets. By emulating the strategies of appropriation pioneered by Duchamp, Warhol, and Lawler, I explore what makes an art work, film, or scholarly presentation original.
Bio: Justin Remes is an associate professor of film studies at Iowa State University. He is the author of Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis (Columbia UP, 2015) and Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing (Columbia UP, 2020). He has also written articles for JCMS: The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Cinema Journal, and Screen. His current book project is a work of experimental scholarship entitled Found Footage Films.