UP THE REPUBLIC! A Bastille Day Special with Richard Barbrook (Online Group Video Session – 14th July 2020)
July 2, 2020The Bad Trip: Charles Manson and the end of the Sixties. A live discussion with James Riley (Online Group Video Discussion – 11th August 2020)
July 12, 2020
I think the mantra at the time was ‘a radical aesthetics for a radical politics’ and that longstanding position, going back to the Soviet Union and so on, was, in a sense, intensified by the feminist aesthetic, which demanded that the image be politicized, and demanded that the relationship between the signifier and the signified be split, so that, in a sense, that feminist position reinforced the avant-gardist splitting of meaning, splitting of signification, questioning representation, questioning what the image referred to and so on.
In her now famous essay ‘Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema‘ (published in 1975, Screen Vol 16) Laura Mulvey deployed the psychoanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to develop a feminist theory of spectatorship within narrative Hollywood Cinema. Drawing upon examples from the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Josef von Sternberg, Mulvey developed a highly influential account of the male gaze, whilst attempting to use the essay to disrupt and destroy the scopophilic pleasures of the narrative fiction film. Throughout her work, Laura Mulvey has woven together feminist and psychoanalytic analysis, avant-gardist aesthetic techniques and radical politics to disrupt the image. Her books Visual and Other Pleasures (1989), Death 24X a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2005), Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times (2019) have continued this exploration of the cinematic image, whilst her films Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974 with Peter Wollen), Riddles of the Sphinx (1977, with Peter Wollen) Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1983, with Peter Wollen), Disgraced Monuments (1991, with Mark Lewis) developed the essay as a film form whilst exploring avant-gardist themes and deploying avant-gardist techniques. In this session we will be joined by Laura Mulvey to discuss her work, themes relating to it and the politics of filmmaking for the future.
This session will be run as part of the Exploding Appendix Avant-garde Art Practice and Research Group’s fortnightly meetup, which, in the event of the current lockdown, will be taking place online via Zoom. https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89727838198 The meeting ID is 897 2783 8198. This session will be run by Bradley Tuck and take place on the 28th July from 19:30 – 22:30 (British Summer Time). If you would like to join us for the session, or have any questions please message me at explodingappendix@gmail.com
