ARTH 384 Theories of Representation: Let the Memory Live Again

• Thursdays, 12:15-14:45
• EV-1-605
• Instructor: Troy Bordun

We keep this love in a photograph
We made these memories for ourselves
Where our eyes are never closing
Hearts are never broken
And time's forever frozen still
- Ed Sheeran, “Photograph,” 2015

This course will assess representations of personal and collective memory in modern and contemporary visual culture alongside corresponding theories of art, photography, film and visual culture. Our theoretical frame will be the phenomenological and/or affective. These theories can help us better understand the creation and interpretation of artworks that adopt remembrance and memory as a core theme or subject matter.
First, we will consider the difficulty of representing memory, here conceptualized as the un-imagine-able/un-image-able/un-watchable by various critics. Following this introductory module, we study the ways photography can provide an imprint of personal or collective memory and then transform the viewer into a witness or ask them to flesh out queer sexuality. From there, we move to Cézanne’s and Bacon’s upending of figuration in painting, read through the above theories. Next, some avant-garde filmmakers dig into the archive and employ visual and aural techniques that evoke spectators’ sensory perceptions. We turn to intercultural and diasporic cinemas as well as queer filmmakers representing the AIDS crisis, among other sites. This emphasis on unofficial histories and personal experience suggests that marginalized artists appeal to the senses in their practices “insofar as [they aim] to represent configurations of sense perceptions different from those of modern Euro-American societies,” i.e., against the grain of dominant discourses and epistemologies (Marks, The Skin of the Film). In the final module of the course, we research comics authors and artists and their efforts to document alternate perceptions of historical moments and challenge official knowledge, as well as illustrate personal testimonies of the often overlooked and inexpressible, namely, illness. Along these same lines, in this same module, we consider performance pieces and installations as two practices in which Indigenous artists reflect on the past and oppose ongoing colonialism and colonialist knowledge formations.