The Jackman Humanities Institute Program for the Arts presents
2008—2009 Inaugural Year Program: Telling Stories
KAJA SILVERMAN
Distinguished Speaker on Photography
27—31 October 2008
Kaja Silverman is Class of l940 Professor of Rhetoric and Film at the University of California‐ Berkeley. She has just completed her ninth book, Flesh of My Flesh, which will appear in 2009. Silverman’s writing and teaching are currently focused primarily on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, photography, time‐based visual art and literature, but she continues to write about and teach courses on cinema, and she has both a developing interest in painting, and an ongoing commitment to feminist theory.
Monday 27 October: “The Miracle of Analogy”
Tuesday 28 October: “The Twilight of Posterity I”
Wednesday 29 October: “The Twilight of Posterity II”
Thursday 30 October: “Rifling through History”
Innis College Town Hall, 2 Sussex Avenue, 7:00 p.m. each evening.
Friday 31 October: Roundtable Discussion
Waters Lounge, Woodsworth College, 119 St. George St., 2:00—4:00 p.m.
Registration: Free and open to the public
Organizer: Prof. Kay Armatage, Acting Director, Cinema Studies Institute
Sponsors: Cinema Studies Institute (Innis College), Dept. of Art
Silverman Lectures: In her four lectures, Kaja Silverman will argue that a photographic negative is not a representation of its model, but rather the model¹s analogue. A positive print analogizes this initial analogue, and the process can be endlessly prolonged – not just from one photograph to another, but also one art form or historical moment to another. Photography is consequently more than a visual technology; it is an ontological calling card, an invitation to us to see that everything really is connected to everything else, through relationships of greater or lesser similarity, that analogy is the structure of Being. In her first lecture, “The Miracle of Analogy,” Silverman will show that a number of photography’s inventors and earlier practitioners thought of it as a graphic rather than an ocular practice, and they knew that they were not the source of its ‘drawings.’ They were also keenly aware of the fundamental instability of the photographic image. Henry Fox- Talbot’s first experiments produced a negative rather than a positive image, and its ’shadows’ darkened over time. Although he overcame the first of these problems, he never fully solved the second; the positive prints he included in the first edition of his 1844 book, The Pencil of Nature, continued to change. The same, Fox Talbot eventually realized, is true of every photograph. Even the digital images we ’shoot’ with our most technically advanced cameras go on developing long after we have finished tinkering with them, because what we see in them is constantly evolving. In her next two lectures, “The Twilight of Posterity” (1) and (2), Silverman shows that Leonardo da Vinci was a photographer avant-la-lettre through a reading of the Louvre’s 2003 exhibition of his manuscripts and drawings. This exhibition included an ‘intervention’ by Irish artist James Coleman, that consisted of four sets of video editing monitors, and a large-screen projection of digital images of The Last Supper. The video monitors, which displayed digital versions of several of Leonardo¹s drawings and one of his paintings, corresponded in complex ways with the rest of the exhibition. The projection figured Leonardo¹s famous, and famously deteriorating, fresco, through a constantly shifting series of close-ups, long-shots, and slow pans across its sumptuous surface. Coleman used them to show that these metamorphoses are internal to the painting itself, and not an external corruption of its original ‘essence.’ He also presented his own images as another stage in this internal development. In her fourth lecture, “Rifling through History,” Silverman will discuss Jeremy Blake’s digital projection, Winchester (2002), the first instalment in a three-part meditation on violence, war, and the American psyche. The trilogy was “inspired” by the life of Sarah Winchester, who inherited the fortune amassed through sales of the Winchester Repeating Rifle, and believed herself to be haunted by the ghosts of those who were killed with the rifle. In a mad attempt to protect herself from these ghosts, Winchester moved to California, and built a vast house, with staircases that go nowhere, and miles of corridors. Blake’s projection begins with a still photograph of this house, which “develops” in as many directions as the house itself; the photograph turns into a film, a Rorschach-like inkblot, a psychedelic light show, and a series of dynamic digital paintings.
