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" Preternatural Performance: "
Sander, Daniel J.
Browning, Barbara
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1113879
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2393757598
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| Main Entry
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Browning, Barbara
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Sander, Daniel J.
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| Title & Author
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Preternatural Performance:\ Sander, Daniel J.Browning, Barbara
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| College
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New York University
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| Date
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2020
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| student score
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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150
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| Abstract
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What is the work of art? That is, not what is the artwork, or what does it mean, but what does it do, how does it perform? My provisional answer, to be argued over the course of the present dissertation, is that, contemporarily, the work of art is to invite and entertain, in all its inhumanity, the chaos that digitality strives to control. I call such performance preternatural: neither naturalist nor supernatural, it offers an alternative response to such containment. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan already suggests in 1969 that the unique social metamorphosis wrought by electronic media makes Chicken Littles of us all, makes us feel like the sky is falling. Whether luddite or futurist in orientation, the apocalyptic impulse is to take shelter, either in the comfort of our former identities or in the promise of technological singularity. Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s response in 1991, however, is that artists resist the trap of imitation and commentary. Artists neither lament nor celebrate the falling sky, but stare at/into it, frame it, take a picture of it. The objective of this dissertation, then, is to analyze a series of artworks — ranging from 1968 to 2012, by Cy Twombly, Joseph Beuys, William S. Burroughs, Patti Smith, Roni Horn, Félix González-Torres, Sonic Youth, and Alex Rose — as performances that make slices in the world configured digitally, holding in abeyance the drive to make sense of its chaos.
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Aesthetics
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Art history
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Digital
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LGBTQ studies
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Performance
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Queer
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