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MC: Jonathan Katz: On the Sexuality of Modernism (GCSC)

When

Jun 07, 2017 from 10:00 to 02:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC200)

Where

Phil I, Building B, R.029

Contact Name

Contact Phone

+49 641 / 99-30 053

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While queer studies in representation have tended to favor, for obvious reasons, the human form, in this class we will instead explore what queer studies can contribute to the understanding of the modernist play with familiar form. Since social prejudice and national law together effectively outlawed any direct or legible evocation of same sex desire in the era before the modern LGBTQ rights movement, forms of abstraction became a powerful means to question prevailing social meanings and engender forms of dissident reading.  From the elisions and performative silences of Rauschenberg and Cage to the explorations of the identity of things in Johns, to Agnes Martin’s marriage of Zen Buddhism and phenomenology to Robert Indiana and Ellsworth Kelly’s hard-edged abstraction and Allen Ginsberg's poetry of polymorphous perversity, in this seminar we will explore how in the right context,  silence, absence, negation, and misdirection  can assume a distinctly political guise. In this process, we will underscore that abstraction is as firmly social historical as the most mimetic forms of realism, and that a liberationist project begins with liberating an audience from the reification of an administered reality in favor of other meanings for other purposes.

 

The mandatory readings are available on Stud.IP after registering.

 

// Prof. Jonathan D. Katz

(University at Buffalo, Department of Art, Director Visual Studies Doctoral Program)

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