Syndicate: BAUDRILLARD: THE VIOLENCE OF THE IMAGE SYMPOSIUM

[Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@transmediale.de>]

From: "artspace2" <artspace@artspace.org.au>
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2001 1:38 PM
Subject: BAUDRILLARD: THE VIOLENCE OF THE IMAGE SYMPOSIUM

SYMPOSIUM: the VIOLENCE of the IMAGE

JEAN BAUDRILLARD DISCUSSING PHOTOGRAPHY & THE IMAGE
SYDNEY, 27 MARCH 2001

An ARTSPACE initiative presented with College of Fine Arts, School Of
Theatre Film & Dance, School of Philosophy, University of NSW, Power
Institute, Research Institute for Humanities & Social Sciences, University
of Sydney, Ambassade de France en Australie

the Violence of the Image
KEYNOTE LECTURE
Jean Baudrillard
Violence of the Image, Violence to the Image
Three types of violence: physical violence, historical violence, violence of
information technologies and media (where we find the violence of the
image). Violence of images as content, violence of the image as medium.
Violence done to the real by the image but also violence done to the image
by the real (moral, political, ideological and aesthetic violence, and more
recently, technological and numerical violence).  The photo as possible
exception to this double violence-of the image and to the image-as an
exception to the spread of the image and as restitution of its power.

SYMPOSIUM SPEAKERS
Nicholas Zurbrugg
Hyper-Hybridity, Hyper-Violence or Hyper-Silence? Virilio, Foucault and
Baudrillard and the Photographic "Event"
How do Foucault's, Virilio's and Baudrillard's most recent texts on art and
photography discuss the photographic 'event'? At one extreme, Foucault's
discussion of French artist G?ard Fromanger's painterly and photographic
hybrids emphasises photography's capacity to release a rhizomic plurality of
images, which apparently dissipate all 'depth' and stability. For Foucault,
such works offer welcome alternatives to what he characterises as the
'austerity' of early C20th imaging.  At the other extreme, Virilio's recent
discussions of multimedia imaging condemn its seemingly omnipresent
gratuitous hyperviolence. For Virilio, the 'Sensation' exhibition typifies a
new kind of commercial 'realism' nurtured upon advertising hype. The
superficiality of this 'Silence of the Lambs' imaging, Virilio suggests,
lacks any trace of the cruel profundity of Otto Dix's early C20th
expressionism or of the Viennese Actionists' mid-century imaging.
Surprisingly, Baudrillard's most recent writings offer far more positive
diagnoses of contemporary imaging. Baudrillard shares Foucault's enthusiasm
for the multidimensional photographic 'event' repeatedly echoing Virilio's
attacks upon the vacuity of commercial imaging, and teasingly equates late
C20th art as a whole with the vacuity of Warhol. Baudrillard's recent
writings develop two key hypotheses. Firstly, they suggest that late C20th
images refine precisely the kinds of depth, stability and illumination that
Foucault and Virilio find virtually incompatible with the late C20th art.
Secondly, they challenge many of his most influential earlier claims,
contending that contemporary photography can 'rediscover' the kind of 'aura'
that Walter Benjamin considered incompatible with mechanical reproduction.
Professor Nicholas Zurbrugg is the Director of the Centre for Contemporary
Arts, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

Rex Butler
Jean Baudrillard : Photographing Ethics
One of the most difficult and yet least discussed passages of Roland
Barthes' well-known 'Camera Lucida' is the following: "The Photograph
belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be
separated: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil,
desire and the object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive". What is
the nature of these strange "dualities" in photography? Why can we conceive
but not perceive them? How, that is, does each turn into the other? We will
attempt to answer these questions by looking at the photography of Jean
Baudrillard - and we will come to a surprising conclusion: that
Baudrillard's photography is nothing less than the attempt to image that
same moral law analysed by Kant ("Du kannst, denn du solst!", "You can
because you must!"). Or, to put this another way, how is Baudrillard's
notion of seduction, which is at stake in his photographs, in fact
profoundly ethical, another version of Kant's moral law? Dr Rex Butler is
Senior Lecturer of Art History in the Department of English, Media Studies &
Ancient History at the University of Queensland.

Alan Cholodenko
APOCALYPTIC ANIMATION: In the Wake of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Godzilla and
Baudrillard
An examination after Baudrillard of the post-World War II animation of Japan
in terms of the nature, history and destiny of animation, film, war and
nation. In this speculation on Apocalyptic Anime-anime in the wake of The
Bomb-and on the animatic thinking of Baudrillard, Akira will feature
prominently. Alan Cholodenko is Senior Lecturer in Film & Animation Studies
in the Department of Art History and Theory, The University of Sydney.

Edward Scheer
Abreacting the impossible again. Baudrillard's photographic acts
Kracauer: 'Those things once clung to us like our skin, and this is how our
property still clings to us today. We are contained in nothing and
photography assembles fragments around a nothing.' (1927) We can be drawn so
deeply into the image, out of our own histories and into another's in a way
which prefigures our own mortality, 'an awareness of a history that does not
include us'.  Barthes' and Benjamin's writings on photography also resonate
with this curiously benign sense of death as the great blindspot that gives
shape and meaning to our images and our histories. But now that photography
itself is dead where can this absence, this sense of loss be registered?
Enter Baudrillard the philosopher of the end of the photograph? In his
essay, 'C'est l'objet qui nous pense' (1998,1999) Baudrillard describes the
photograph itself in its 'happier moments' as an 'acting out on the world, a
way of grasping the world by expelling it,S (a)n 'abreacting of the world.'
Here the image gaily expels the demons of the world, merrily discharges the
affects associated with the trauma of living. But now that the photograph
has its own problems, its own crisis, Baudrillard takes up his camera to
assist in the abreaction of the image. Dr. Edward Scheer lectures in the
School of Theatre Film & Dance, UNSW.

Anna Munster
Digital Violence: Images at the Cutting Edge
Over 20 years ago Eysenck was publishing his studies to support the
hypothesis that violent media images lead to an increase in violent and
aggressive behaviour in viewers.  Although Eysenck was attentive to some
aspects of the transmission of media images, for example, repetition and
saturation, his main concern was with violence as media representation. And
yet digital images typically are said to carry less information and operate
purely at the level of information/communications. On what affective level
then can the digital be said to operate? Do digital images carry less
violence than media such as analogue photography? To what extent can
digitality be said to bypass representation but still register corporeally?
Dr. Anna Munster is a digital artist who teaches Digital Media in the Dep't
of Art History & Theory, College of Fine Arts, UNSW.

Robyn Ferrell
The Body of the Photographer
'We must therefore stop wondering how and why red signifies effort or
violence, green restfulness and peace; we must rediscover how to live these
colours as our body does, that is, as peace or violence in concrete form ...
red, by its texture as followed and adhered to by our gaze, is already the
amplification of our motor being.' In this consideration of sensation,
Merleau-Ponty describes a situation that brings about intellection, but
which must also be different from it, since it can only appear as opaque to
intellection. The mind/body distinction confronts intellection as a symptom
of its inability to think its basis in the body in the way it thinks its
other objects. And this turns out to be the crux of the opacity, for the
perceptual body is before the object - before the subject, too - and makes
the subject and object for intellection through its habits of synthesis.
These habits, being not propositional but experiential and specific to the
body's possible orientation, exceed intellection, precede it and even
contradict it, while also manufacturing it. Body-attitude is not itself
another truth about the world, but a preparation for it. Robyn Ferrel is
Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Macquarie University

Program
2.00 PM
Session 1
Chair   Julian Pefanis, University of Sydney
Nicholas Zurbrugg
Rex Butler
Alan Cholodenko

3.45 PM   BREAK 15 mins

4.00 PM
Session 2
Chair   Andrew Haas, University of New South Wales
Robyn Ferrell
Anna Munster
Edward Scheer

6.00 PM   Exhibition Opening
The Murder of the Image by Jean Baudrillard
Launch by Prof. Ian Howard, Dean COFA

7.30 PM
Session 3
Chair   Paul Patton, Director RIHSS, University of Sydney
Keynote Lecture
Jean Baudrillard

Venue
COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS, UNSW
SELWYN STREET, PADDINGTON
LECTURE THEATRE EGO2

Cost
KEYNOTE LECTURE JEAN BAUDRILLARD - $10
SYMPOSIUM SESSIONS 1 & 2 - $20/$10 CONCESSION
BAUDRILLARD LECTURE + SYMPOSIUM - $30/$20

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