Jan Mieszkowski and Sandra Percival
Thursday, September 24, 7-9pm
*6pm pre-event with cocktails and screening
6pm: Whiskey cocktail hour and Screening of Beckett's Film, 1963 (26min) followed by Douglas's Video, 2007 (18min)
7pm: Event begins
In his many encounters with Samuel Beckett, Douglas seeks to take us beyond the notorious gallows humor of Waiting for Godot and Endgame—“traditional plays,” as he calls them. What he finds in Beckett’s oeuvre is not a bleak tragicomic outlook on existence, but an affirmation of the possibility for new subjectivities that are not modeled on Eurocentric capitalist archetypes. In juxtaposing Douglas’s Mime video with Beckett’s Not I, we will be interested in the similarities between their meditations on the possibility and impossibility of telling one’s own story with and through the mask that is the face. If Mime is characterized by paranoia or even self-disavowal, Douglas’s retelling of the nineteenth-century German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann asks what it would mean for the film screen itself to be beset by feelings of the uncanny. This piece also reveals the degree to which Douglas, like Hoffmann and Beckett, is fascinated by the ghostly hybrids that emerge at the intersections of verbal, visual and auditory media.
Jan Mieszkowski is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Reed College. He is the author of Labors of Imagination: Aesthetics and Political Economy From Kant to Althusser (Fordham, 2006) and Watching War (Stanford, 2012). His recent articles explore a variety of topics in Romanticism and critical theory, modern art and performance studies, and the philosophical and ideological foundations of contemporary literary criticism. Mieszkowski has a B.A. summa cum laude with Distinction in Literature from Yale University and a M.A. and Ph. D. in German Literature from The John Hopkins University. He is currently completing a new book called Crises of the Sentence.
Sandra Percival is director and curator of Zena Zezza.
Reception follows with libations.
*6pm pre-event with cocktails and screening
6pm: Whiskey cocktail hour and Screening of Beckett's Film, 1963 (26min) followed by Douglas's Video, 2007 (18min)
7pm: Event begins
In his many encounters with Samuel Beckett, Douglas seeks to take us beyond the notorious gallows humor of Waiting for Godot and Endgame—“traditional plays,” as he calls them. What he finds in Beckett’s oeuvre is not a bleak tragicomic outlook on existence, but an affirmation of the possibility for new subjectivities that are not modeled on Eurocentric capitalist archetypes. In juxtaposing Douglas’s Mime video with Beckett’s Not I, we will be interested in the similarities between their meditations on the possibility and impossibility of telling one’s own story with and through the mask that is the face. If Mime is characterized by paranoia or even self-disavowal, Douglas’s retelling of the nineteenth-century German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann asks what it would mean for the film screen itself to be beset by feelings of the uncanny. This piece also reveals the degree to which Douglas, like Hoffmann and Beckett, is fascinated by the ghostly hybrids that emerge at the intersections of verbal, visual and auditory media.
Jan Mieszkowski is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Reed College. He is the author of Labors of Imagination: Aesthetics and Political Economy From Kant to Althusser (Fordham, 2006) and Watching War (Stanford, 2012). His recent articles explore a variety of topics in Romanticism and critical theory, modern art and performance studies, and the philosophical and ideological foundations of contemporary literary criticism. Mieszkowski has a B.A. summa cum laude with Distinction in Literature from Yale University and a M.A. and Ph. D. in German Literature from The John Hopkins University. He is currently completing a new book called Crises of the Sentence.
Sandra Percival is director and curator of Zena Zezza.
Reception follows with libations.
Stan Douglas, "Mime, Deux Devises" (film still), 1983. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, New York/London and Victoria Miro, London