Crossmappings: On Visual Culture

Description

The great, influential cultural critic, Elisabeth Bronfen, sets out in this book a conversation between literature, cinema and visual culture. The crossmappings facilitated in and between these essays address the cultural survival of image formulas involving portraiture and the uncanny relation between the body and its visual representability, the gendering of war, death and the fragility of life, as well as sovereignty and political power. Each chapter tracks transformations that occur as aesthetic figurations travel from one historical moment to another, but also from one medium to another. Many prominent artists are discussed during these journeys into the cultural imaginary, include Degas, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Wagner, Picasso, and Shakespeare, as well as classic Hollywood's film noir and melodrama and the TV series, The Wire and House of Cards. Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents List of Illustrations Series Preface Foreword: Introducing Elisabeth Bronfen Introduction: Crossmappings – Visual Readings as a Critical Intervention in the Cultural Imaginary Part I: Travelling Image Formulas 1. Facing Defacement: Degas’ Portraits of Women Dialectic of displacement Gendering the scene of portraiture Deconstructing the scene of portraiture 2. Naked Touch: Disfiguration, Recognition and the Female Nude What recedes from the gaze Fetish or curiosity To stop and to see 3. Leaving an Imprint: Francesca Woodman’s Photographic tableaux vivants The silhouette in the room Poses of self- reification Poses of self- staging Two crossmappings Appearing by disappearing 4. Pop Cinema: Hollywood’s Critical Engagement with America’s Culture of Consumption Pleasures of the outtake; or the economy of popular culture Cinema as merchandise; or pop stance avant la lettre Celebrity; or pop art revisited 5. Hitler Goes Pop: Totalitarianism, Avant- Garde Aesthetics and Hollywood Entertainment 6. Simulations of the Real: Paul McCarthy’s Performance Disasters 7. Wagner’s Isolde in Hollywood Feminine sacrifice Liebestod as evidence Isolde’s triumph 8. Shakespeare’s Wire It’s all in the game Aristocratic war games, American style All the world’s a stage 9. Queen of Chess: On Serial Reading Rules of the game Chess code A black and a white queen A queen, both white and black Part II: Gendering The Uncanny, Imaging Death 10. The Horror of the Familiar: Freud’s Thoughts on Femininity and the Uncanny The homely turned strange The maternal body and the uncanny Uncanny femininity The enigma of femininity Surrealism’s game with the feminine uncanny 11. Gendering Curiosity: The Double Games of Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster and Sophie Calle Siri Hustvedt’s postmodern Pandora Paul Auster’s conceptualist artist Sophie Calle goes by the book 12. The Other Self of the Imagination: Cindy Sherman’s Hysterical Performance 13. Eva Hesse’s Spectral Bride and her Uncanny Double 14. Wounds of Wonder: Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Nabuyoshi Araki 15. The Fragility of the Quotidian: Eija- Liisa Ahtila’s Work with Death 16. Picasso’s War Women 17. Contending with the Father: Louise Bourgeois and her Aesthetics of Reparation Resculpting past trauma The daughter’s complaint Notes Index