Word: subjection
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...certainly have been involved in critiquing certain controlling ideas that have been the ways of forming objects of study. For example, the work I've done on Jackson Pollock has been involved in trying to show that to continue to think of Pollock as a biographically contained subject who is a volitional agent is a benighted idea. For me, the only way to think about Pollock is through the sort of force field that was warring over his interpretation. That's an example of a sort of "death of the author" theory, and that's not a "paranoid scenario...
...Thinking back to your comments on Pollock as a historically benighted subject, I'm interested to know about your new work on Picasso. In your essay "In the Name of Picasso," you're obviously very concerned with that overly biographical, benighted subject approach...
...Picasso is obviously the focus of an incredible biography industry. Picasso as a subject seems never to end as a fascination maybe not for your generation, but for an older generation. And what's interesting to me is that this Picasso, who after all did do something pretty great--cubism--immediately afterward begins to do something which many people would normally feel is not really great: namely a whole career as a pasticheur. So after cubism he becomes this super imitator of Ingres, Corot, Renoir, Poussin...
...course then there's a kind of irony that he's the center of this biographical fascination, and yet he is working at leeching away the substance of a unified subject. So, for me Picasso poses the interesting art historical problem of what counts as an explanation, I've come up with an explanation I would call symptomatic, which has more to do with the structure of what happened. A symptom is about a kind of conversion of something that's internal which then interacts with something external to coalesce in a certain kind of formation...
Lincoln appears briefly in his theater seat in the balcony, but the subject of the play is the assassin, not the victim. Afterwards, the audience sees Booth curled up with a bottle of wine and an old blanket. His pain and confusion is almost pitiable, yet McNeely's performance was also chilling enough to make the audience feel guilty for sympathizing with an assassin. Juliene James '00 appears onstage with him as The Balladeer, a narrator of sorts who comments on and interacts with the characters, falling somewhere in between Jiminy Cricket and a Greek chorus. She cuts into Booth...