Vortrag Johanne Lamoureux
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von 18:15 bis 20:15
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1929 - Capital Transformation. Meat in Soutine, Eisenstein, Lotar & Co
In the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, a wide range of cultural practices in various media and genres (literature, theatre, cinema, photography, painting) tackles the motif of meat and the issue of the butcher trade. In 1929, French author, art critic and art historian Elie Faure (1873-1937) devotes the first pages of his short monograph on Chaim Soutine to the artist’s recent pictures of animal carcasses. Orchestrating a transmutation of color and painterly flesh into rivers of gems, Faure’s dated and ornamented prose is rather atypical of the period’s interest in this topic yet it speaks eloquently about the significant role of meat in a certain narrative of modern aesthetics. Indeed Faure’s introduction on the painterly treatment of dead flesh allows him to revisit one of the leitmotifs through which the authors he admired in his youth, and among them first and foremost Emile Zola, had elaborated their own brand of materialism. Faure was convinced that painting and sculpture were destined to disappear and be replaced by cinema. It should therefore prove interesting to test his own beliefs and his own praise of the machine in relation to the way other media, around the same time, focus on meat without treating it as an emblematic material but proposing instead to consider it as a paradigmatic process.of modern industrial capitalism.
Prof. Dr. Johanne Lamoureux
is Full Professor at the department of Art History and Film Studies (Université de Montréal). She is the author of L’art insituable. De l’in situ et autres sites (2001), Profession: historienne de l’art (2007) and co-editor (with Olivier Asselin and Christine Ross) of The Precarious Visualities of Contemporary Arts (2010). As a free-lance curator, she organized Bio-Fictions (2000) and Doublures (2003) at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and (with Charlie Hill and Ian Thom) the touring retrospective Emily Carr. New Perspectives at the National Gallery of Canada (2006-2008).