The Life of the Artist
From Abjection to Icon: Artist Biopics and the Representation of Artists’ Historical Identities
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Julie Codell
Across all types of artists' film biographies, or biopics—whether Hollywood or independent or European art films—artists are represented as abject figures in several forms: extreme poverty, sexual licentiousness, drinking, drugs and anti-social behavior. These films imply a link between abjection and creativity that generates a conflict between creativity’s unrestrained behavior, and the art world of dealers, critics and exhibitions defined by economics and social restraint. Artists are unable to fit into the social order of their own art world; both Jackson Pollock (1912-56) in Pollock (2000) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) in Basquiat (1996) suffer under success and are extremely abject, yet their abjection works differently for Pollock than for African-American Basquiat. Lee Krasner (1908-84) in Pollock is not abject but her gender renders her unable to fulfill national (Pollock) and international (Basquiat) cultural ambitions that the other artists fulfill. The theme in artist biopics is the sacrifice of abject artists to society which, in turn, appropriates their art as transcendent national achievements, a fundamental conflict between society’s rejection of abject artists and society’s praise and appropriation of their “transcendental” art. Abject artists are in history and in a material world; but their artworks are redefined as ahistorical and spiritual. I will briefly contrast these films with the extreme abjection of Van Gogh, the paradigmatic abject artist unsuccessful in his lifetime, in Lust for Life (1956) and with Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986), in which the highly successful abject artist is not marginalized but mirrors his corrupt late-Renaissance patrons.
(Portrait) Drawings by Antonin Artaud: Exhortations in the Middle Voice
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hazel Antaramian Hofman
The final creative acts of French actor/writer Antonin Artaud consisted of numerous (portrait) drawings executed within Eckhartian notions of detachment and letting be. This paper suggests that these drawings articulate a metaphysical middle voice wherein the Heideggerian middle-voiced character of releasement as Gelassenheit is echoed in terms of letting-be. It is from an Eckhartian-Heideggerian releasement and experimental linguistic transformations that the Artaudian (portrait) drawings, evaluated as inseparable from his life and oeuvre, tend toward a middle voice. Along with this posit, Artaud, as a French cinema and theater actor of the continental Surrealist period is considered within the parameters of an actor in Samuel Beckett’s Theater of the Absurd. It is here and in Eckhart where Artaud's visual middle voice also speaks from a place of experimentation and transformation, experimentation not too dissimilar to what Artaud pines for in his exhortations for the transformation of culture using alchemy as the numinous language in response to the corruption of the organism. As the thesis of this paper imparts an experimental approach to the study of Artaud’s drawings as middle voice, it does so by way of threading disparate disciplines and philosophical thinking as they apply to the impetus of the creative act and a singular enigmatic voice. Herein, the creative act from which Artaud operates will be shown in terms of Gelassenheit, and the mode of the middle voice as an operative linguistic tangentiality of the arts.
The Artístic Colletion of the Sculptor João da Silva: The Contribution of the Study and Museological Inventory of a Legacy to Be Unveiled
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Arlinda Fortes
João da Silva (1880-1960) was a notable plastic artist of the first half of the twentieth century, distinguishing himself in the areas of sculpture, medal, numismatics, and jewelry. He was the author of the first gold coin of the Portuguese Republic in 1916 and of the bust of the republic for the Constituent Assembly, among other works of great recognition in the Portuguese art history, whether by order or by contest, where he was awarded several times in Portugal and abroad. With works represented in public spaces, and museological institutions, public and private, João da Silva, to this day, did not have the due recognition, by society, and with which he contributed so much, as an educator, theoretician, and republican militant. It was his sense of duty to society, which led him and his wife, to donate their home and studio, as well as his entire artistic collection, and part of the filling, to the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes (SBNA), so that a House-Museum could be created there for public fruition of its collection and personal library. For legal-administrative reasons that lasted until the middle of 2018, it has only recently been allowed access to the collection for study and its respective museological inventory, which has made it possible to identify different typologies, materials and production techniques that were considered to be of great scientific and technological progress.
